Professor Katherine Wilson
Professor of Later Medieval European History
Biography
Katherine Wilson is Professor of Later Medieval European History at the University of Chester. As a historian of the European Later Middle Ages her research and teaching focuses on the shifting patterns of material culture and its commercial, cultural and political contexts. Katherine is an active research scholar, securing external academic funding and has written and published widely. Her research and teaching has a strong public impact and engagement focus. Katherine leads on 'Chester Festival of Ideas' a programme of free, inclusive and accessible public events on a wide range of themes in and around Chester, co-created by the University of Chester and external stakeholders and city partners to help shape, implement and deliver the University's Research and Knowledge Exchange Strategy.
Teaching and Supervision
Katherine teaches a range of modules on Medieval European History at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She co-designed and delivers History at Work: Pathways to your future, a second year module where students undertake projects with external Heritage partners and teaching immersions in primary and secondary schools. She supervises and examines a wide range of postgraduate research and taught degrees as senior supervisor and supervisor.
Research and Knowledge Exchange
Katherine's principal research interests lie in seeking to understand the relationship between social, economic and cultural change in fourteenth and fifteenth century Europe through the examination of shifting patterns in the uses of material culture. Her research and published work to date has focused on a powerful late medieval polity, the Burgundian Netherlands (1363-1477), examining the means by which objects contributed to the projection of social status for urban inhabitants and the cultural construction of political authority in the Burgundian territories. Her work has also examined and reconstructed the biographies of medieval producers and users of objects. Her research is developed from archival work on ducal accounts, ducal and urban inventories, wills and literary works. Katherine's externally funded impact and engagement projects have produced public exhibitions, object boxes for loan to schools, digital and virtual reality reconstructions of medieval city sites and extensive teaching resources for Key Stages 1-3 and GSCE.