PEOPLE – RICHARD JONES
Richard read History and Archaeology at Exeter before moving on to Oxford where he completed his DPhil in 1994. He worked for the Sussex Archaeological Society for five years before taking up a research fellowship at Birmingham in 2000 working on the Whittlewood Project. In 2001 this project relocated to Leicester where he joined the Centre for English Local History. Briefly escaping to Cardiff in 2005 as a Lecturer in Archaeology he returned to ELH as Lecturer in Landscape History the following year and has been there ever since. In 2017 he became Director of the Centre. He is a medieval landscape and environmental historian whose research explores the complex relationships that developed between rural communities and their locales/environments in England, Wales, and France across the whole of the Middle Ages (c. 500-1500AD). His work sits within the interstices of several disciplines including history, archaeology, physical and historical geography, and toponomastics. His studies of place-making, agricultural practice, and responses to environmental threats in medieval England and Wales have been conducted at local, regional, and national scales.