Qualifications
MA, PhD (Cambridge)
Academic Background
Educated at Newnham College Cambridge. Research Fellow then Fellow and Tutor, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge 1989-93; Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Professor of Early Medieval History at University of Sheffield, 1993-2007.
Undergraduate Teaching
History of the Western Church, 1050-1350; The English Church and Mission, 597-754
Research Interests
Medieval monasticism, particularly Anglo-Saxon monasteries and women in religion. Wider interests in the early medieval Church and society and the invention of the English and in historiography and historical theory. An edition of the Anglo-Saxon Charters of Bury St Edmunds Abbey prepared with Kathryn A Lowe is forthcoming with the British Academy. Current project: a major study of the life and work of the Venerable Bede.
Publications include
Veiled Women: the Disappearance of Nuns from Anglo-Saxon England (2 vols, Ashgate, 2000)
Monastic Life in Anglo-Saxon England c. 600-900 (Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Æthelstan: the First King of England (Yale University Press, 2011)
The Oxford History of Historical Writing, II 600-1400, ed. with Chase F. Robinson (Oxford University Press, 2012);
The Sage Handbook of Historical Theory, ed. with Nancy Partner (Sage Publications, 2013)
Bede’s Church, Jarrow Lecture 2012 (St Paul’s Church, Jarrow, 2013)
