Professor Chris Woolgar
Professor of History and Archival Studies, Chair of Exams; MA Convenor
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Professor Chris Woolgar is a Professor of History and Archival Studies at the University of Southampton.
Chris Woolgar read archaeology and history at the University of Southampton, before training as an archivist at the University of Liverpool. He catalogued the archives of two Oxford colleges (Magdalen and Corpus Christi), and returned to Southampton in 1982 to work on the papers of the first Duke of Wellington in the University Library. He was Head of Special Collections in the Library, 1991-2013, where he established the Library’s manuscript collections, which now encompass more than 6 million manuscripts, focused on political, military and official papers connected to the University’s region, and extensive holdings relating to the Jewish people. He led the campaign which secured the Broadlands Archives — including the papers of Lord Palmerston and Lord Mountbatten — for the University in 2012. Chris was appointed to a chair in History and Archival Studies in 2007 and transferred to the Faculty of Humanities in 2013.
Chris has a long-standing interest in the history of the everyday, especially in the medieval period, in patterns of documentation and in editorial work. While cataloguing the archives of Magdalen College, he discovered several groups of medieval domestic accounts, and he subsequently did his doctorate at the University of Durham on the development of these records. His publications on social and economic history include two volumes of medieval household accounts edited for the British Academy’s Records of Social and Economic History series, an edition of the testamentary records of the medieval bishops of England and Wales for the Canterbury and York Society, The Great Household in Late Medieval England and The Senses in Late Medieval England (Yale University Press, 1999 and 2006), and an edited volume, Food in Medieval England (Oxford University Press, 2006), a cross-disciplinary collection of essays on diet and nutrition. His latest book, The Culture of Food in England, 1200–1500, to be published by Yale University Press in the spring of 2016, explores what food meant to society, and the customs and practices that were connected to it.
Journal of Medieval History
Since 2009 Chris has edited the Journal of Medieval History. The journal publishes material on all aspects of the history of Europe and the Mediterranean from the fifth century to the start of the sixteenth. Submissions are welcome through the journal’s website.