Dr Thomas Pickles
Associate Professor
Biography
Dr Thomas Pickles is Associate Professor of Early Medieval History in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. He is Research Coordinator for History and Programme Leader for the MRes in History. He is General Editor for the Brepols series Studies in the Early Middle Ages, a member of the Advisory Board of the journal Northern History, and Chair of the Chester Archaeological Society, and Principal Investigator of the UKRI AHRC funded project Early Christian Churches and Landscapes (ECCLES). He teaches on the Undergraduate and Postgraduate History programmes, and supervises MRes and PhD researchers.
Teaching and Supervision
Dr Pickles teaches across the Undergraduate and Post-Graduate History programmes. His modules focus on the early and high middle ages and include subjects such as the Crusades, the viking diaspora, the Norman Conquest, and pre-modern courts. He is joint module leader for the pioneering History module History at Work, which challenges students to engage with the professional frameworks for Heritage and Teaching, and requires them to design their on frameworks and deliver real-world projects to briefs set out by external partners including the Chester PGCE History, Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, the Grosvenor Museum Chester, and Chester Cathedral.
Research and Knowledge Exchange
Dr Pickles researches the social and cultural analysis of religious belief and practices in the early middle ages (400-1200). His research is interdisciplinary, bringing together textual, material, and linguistic culture. His first book - Kingship, Society, and the Church in Anglo-Saxon Yorkshire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) - investigated the social and cultural processes of conversion to Christianity and church building in the early medieval kingdom of the Deirans (modern Yorkshire). He is currently engaged in researching and writing a local-global history of Whitby Abbey from its foundation in 657 to the present day. His UKRI AHRC funded project, Early Christian Churches and Landscapes (ECCLES), a collaboration with Professor Sally Foster (University of Stirling) and Dr Tomás Ó Carragáin (University College Cork), is creating a public web resource for churches across Britain and Ireland, to meet the needs of a range of strategic, educational and infrastructural stakeholders.