Supervisors of Postgraduate Research In Medieval Studies
Dr Jackson Armstrong (MPhil, PhD [Cantab]) joined the History department as a lecturer in 2008. His academic interests are focused on the late medieval British Isles. His current research deals with the fifteenth-century Anglo-Scottish borderlands, and the themes of frontiers, conflict, law and kinship. His research also includes chivalry, heraldry and the law and office of arms.
Dr Karen Bek-Pedersen (PhD [Edinburgh]) joined the History department as a lecturer in 2008. Her research interests include: Old Norse mythology, Norse-Celtic cultural interaction during the Viking Age and before, gender roles in early medieval Scandinavia and Nordic and Scottish folklore.
Professor Stefan Brink (PhD [Uppsala]) joined the History department in 2005 as Professor of Scandinavian studies. His research interests include; the society and culture of early Scandinavia, landscape history, Viking slavery, and Germanic place-names. He has published several books on Scandinavian place-names and recently completed a major study of slavery in the Viking Age which will be published in 2006.
Dr Clare Downham (MA [St.And.], M.Phil, PhD [Cantab.]) joined the Department of Celtic as a Lecturer in 2004, having previously worked at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Her recent book is entitled Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland: The Dynasty of Ívarr to AD 1014 (Edinburgh, 2007). The focus of her teaching is the history and archaeology of Scotland to AD 1200. She is interested in all aspects of the Irish and British past in the early and central Middle Ages.
Professor David Dumville (MA [Cantab.], PhD [Edin.]) was appointed Professor of History and Palaeography in 2005, arriving in Aberdeen from the University of Cambridge, where he was Professor of Palaeography and Cultural History in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic. His main interests lie in the history of Britain and Ireland and Scandinavia in the Middle Ages and the analysis of the sources for that history. His most recent publications include Ireland’s Desert-Fathers, The Culdees: An Introduction to their Consuetudinal Literature (Edinburgh, 2008); and A Palaeographer’s Review. The Insular System of Scripts in the Early Middle Ages. Volume II (Kansai University Press, 2004).
Dr Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner (PhD [Munich]) is a specialist in later medieval religion, and especially religious women in both England and Germany. A member of the Divinity & History Departments, her publications include a study of the education of Dominican women in southern Germany Die Bildung der Dominkanerinnen in Süddeutschland vom 13-15. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 2004), and a forthcoming volume will focus on the building protestant identity in early sixteenth-century England. Before arriving in Aberdeen Marie-Luise taught in both Tübingen and Cambridge.
Professor Angelo Forte (LLB, MA [Edin.]) After a period in private practice, Professor Forte taught at the universities of Glasgow, Dundee and Edinburgh before taking up his professorial appointment in 1993. Aside from his expertise in commercial law, Professor Forte is also an expert in legal history, and especially in maritime law and technology in the medieval period. Together with Frederik Pedersen, he is author of Viking Empires: Vikings, Gaels and Normans, c.500-1300, published by Cambridge University Press in 2005. He co-supervises several doctoral theses in various aspects of medieval history with a legal content.
Dr Jane Geddes (BA [Cantab.], MA, PhD [Lond.]) is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Art. She has published widely on medieval decorative ironwork; Scottish church architecture; and medieval manuscripts. Her many publications in these areas include Medieval Decorative Ironwork (1999) Deeside and the Mearns: An Illustrated Architectural Guide (2001) and the edited volume King’s College Chapel, Aberdeen, 1500-2000 (2000) and she is currently writing a book on the St Albans Psalter for the British Library, related to the web-based edition of the psalter for which she won a major grant to produce.
Dr Glyn Hesketh (MA [Oxon.], MA, PhD [Manchester]), a Senior Lecturer in the Department of French, is the editor of a 3-volume Anglo-Norman theological encyclopaedia, La Lumere as Lais (vol. I, 1996, vol. II, 1998, vol. III, 2000). His edition of an Anglo-Norman Life of St Katherine of Alexandria was also published in 2000. He is currently working on further Old French theological and encyclopaediac texts.
Dr Margaret Jubb (MA, PhD [Cantab.]) is a Senior Lecturer in French and has published widely on literary representations of the Crusades, including a critical edition of the Estoires d'Outremer et de la naissance Salehadin (1990), while her Legend of Saladin in Western Literature and Historiography was published in 2000. She has also published the co-authored French Grammar in Context: Analysis and Practice (1998) and recently completed another language textbook published by Arnold in 2003.
Dr Alastair Macdonald (MA, PhD [Aberd.]) joined the History Department as a Lecturer in 1997. His main research interests are in the history of war, Anglo-Scottish relations and frontier societies in the later middle ages. He is also developing a new interest in the history of sport in the medieval period and after. His first monograph Border Bloodshed: Scotland and England at War, 1369-1403 was published in 2000, and he is currently engaged on research for a second monograph, provisionally entitled War and Society in Later Medieval Scotland.
Derrick McClure (MA [Glas.], MLitt [Edin.], MBE) previously taught at the Universities of Tübingen (Germany) and Ottawa (Canada), and is currently a Senior Lecturer in English. His principal fields of interest are the social, philological and literary history of the Scots language, poetic translation, metre and scansion, and the phonetics of Scottish English. His publications include Scots and its Literature (a collection of essays), Why Scots Matters (a short monograph), and numerous articles and conference papers on Scottish linguistic and literary topics. He was awarded an MBE in 2002 for services to Scottish culture.
Dr Robert McColl Millar (MA [Glas.], PhD [Lond.]) has worked in Canada, Finland, Austria and Norway. Since 1997 he has been a Lecturer in English at Aberdeen. He has published on the interface between Gaelic and Scots in Northern Scots, lexical attrition in Modern Scots, rapid language change and its connection with language contact, and the development of the definite article in English. His book, System Collapse, System Rebirth: The Demonstrative Systems of English 900-1350 and the Birth of the Definite Article, was published by Peter Lang in 2000. He is presently researching for a book on language use and language attitudes in the Statistical Accounts of Scotland. He is the co-ordinator of the Language and Identities in the North-East of Scotland initiative.
Dr Karen Milek (BA [Toronto], MPhil, PhD [Cantab]) was appointed to a Lectureship in Archaeology in 2007. Since 2005 she has worked as Director of the Field School in North Atlantic Archaeology in Iceland. She has published a wide range of articles on the geoarchaeological analyses of soils from different medieval sites. Her teaching ranges across the fields of Viking Age archaeology and history.
Dr Ralph O’Connor (BA, M.Phil, PhD [Cantab]) was appointed to a Lectureship in 2005, having previously been a Research Fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge. His critical edition to the post-classical Icelandic sagas, Icelandic Histories and Romances, was published in 2002, and he is currently completing a lengthy analysis of a Gaelic legendary tale, which will be published by Four Courts Press as The King the Spectres Exiled: Reading Togail Bruidne Da Derga. This work will be the first scholarly monograph ever published on a single medieval Gaelic saga.
Dr Aideen O’Leary (BA, MLitt [Dubl.], PhD [Cantab.]), is a Lecturer in Celtic, specialising in medieval Irish and Welsh literature and Insular Latin. Current projects include a book on the historical implications of apocryphal legend in the Gaelic world, and a study of foreign perceptions of Ireland from Antiquity to approx. A.D. 1200.
Dr Frederik Pedersen (MA [York & Toronto], PhD [Copenhagen & Toronto]) is a Lecturer in History. He has just published a major new work on Vikings Empires for Cambridge University Press, though his research interests also extend to canon law, marriage and sexuality in the Middle Ages. His monograph on Marriage Disputes in Medieval England was published in 2000 and is based upon extensive research in the ecclesiastical records of York. He has now begun to expand this area of his research into analysing the impact and reception of canon law in Scandinavia.
Professor Neil Price (BA [UCL], PhD [Uppsala]) was appointed in 2007 as Professor of Archaeology. His major publications include The Vikings in Brittany (1989) The Viking Way: Religion and War in the Later Iron Age of Scandinavia (2002, second edition 2008). He also edited The Archaeology of Shamanism (2001) and is co-editor (with Stefan Brink) of The Viking World (2008).
Professor Jane Stevenson (BA, PhD [Cantab.]) is a Professor within the department of History, her interests focussing on medieval and early modern literature (particularly in the British Isles, Italy, and the Netherlands); the social history of (especially women’s) verse; post-classical Latin; literacy and orality; different forms of publication (scribal publication, different kinds of printing, epigraphy); and women’s access to, and use of, various forms of power. She is currently completing an edition of The Latin Hymns of the Irish Church (Scriptores Latini Hiberniae). Jane is also an accomplished and best-selling author of fiction.
Dr Nick Thompson (BA, M.Th. [Otago], MA [Brit. Columbia], PhD [Glas.]) began academic life studying Latin and medieval English literature in New Zealand and then in Canada. He returned to the University of Otago in New Zealand to study theology, undertaking his doctoral study in Glasgow. Now a Lecturer in the Department of Divinity, he is a specialist in the sixteenth-century reformer Martin Bucer (having published Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Patristic Tradition in the Theology of Martin Buces, 1534-1546 in 2005) but also interested in pre-Reformation religious developments, and especially in pilgrimage.
Dr Tarrin Wills (PhD [Sydney]) joined the English department as a lecturer in 2007. His research interests include: Old Norse-Icelandic language and literature; textual editing; palaeography, runology and the post-medieval reception of medieval literature. He has been closely involved with the international research project, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages (publ. Brepols) since 2001.