Historical Conference

The Very Revd Professor Sarah Foot

Professor Sarah Foot is the Dean of Christ Church, the first woman to be chosen for the role in Christ Church’s almost 500-year-long history. Until her appointment in July 2023, she held the title of Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford University and served as a Residentiary Canon at Christ Church. Her teaching and research have focused on women in religion, medieval monasticism and the early history of the English Church. She is the author of the first recent biography of Athelstan published in 2012 by Yale University Press: Athelstan, The first King of England.

Dr Charles Insley

Dr Charles Insley has been a Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at Manchester since 2012, having held posts at Canterbury Christ Church, Northampton and Bangor Universities since 1995. He was head of the History Department at Manchester between 2018 and 2021.

Charles Insley studied for his undergraduate and doctoral degrees at the University of Oxford, receiving his doctorate in 1998 for a thesis on the pre-Norman Conquest archive of Exeter Cathedral. His first post was at Bangor University, on a project (with Professor Huw Pryce) to edit the surviving Acta of the Welsh Princes (1137-1283), which was published in 2005. He is a historian of the Atlantic Archipelago in the earlier Middle Ages, ca. 800-1100 and has published widely on aspects of English and Welsh history during that period. His current interests centre on a comparative study of queens and elite women in the Atlantic Archipelago during the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries.

Dr Rebecca Thomas

Dr Rebecca Thomas specialises in the history, culture, and literature of medieval Wales. The process of creating Welsh identities in medieval texts is her main research interest, and her book on this subject, History and Identity in Early Medieval Wales, was published by Boydell & Brewer in April 2022. This volume examines the features used as signs of identity in Latin and Welsh texts, including names, territory, language, and legends of origin. This volume was awarded the Francis Jones Prize for Welsh History 2022. In 2023, she was awarded the Learned Society of Wales’s Dillwyn Medal for contribution to the humanities and creative arts.

Dr Thomas is also a Welsh-language novelist and has published two medieval historical novels for young adults, Dan Gysgod y Frenhines (‘In the Queen’s Shadow’) and Y Castell ar y Dŵr (‘A Castle on Water’).

Joseph Jackson

Joseph Jackson has a BA in Archaeology & Heritage Management and is currently concluding his Masters in archaeology and hopes to go on to a PhD. Joseph was born in Penrith and grew up in the village of Shap, he has spent 35 years studying history and archaeology. He has worked in the field in commercial archaeology and as well as supervising excavations. He has been an archaeological advisor from the National Geographic. His specialises in Roman frontier history and archaeology and the early medieval period in northern England. He has a particular interest in the history of Cumbria from AD410 – 1018 with a particular focus on the Northumbrian and North centuries and the build to and impact of the Treaty of Eamont.

He is the author of “In Search of Cumbria” And studies the impact and survival of Old Norse and Old English in the Westmorland dialect. Joseph has also spent many years working as an education office in schools and colleges helping to bring history to life and inspire future historians and archaeologists.