Professor Chris Woolgar BA, PhD, Dip. Arch. Admin, FBA, FRHistS
Emeritus Professor of History and Archival Studies, Fellow of the British Academy
Chris Woolgar is Emeritus Professor of History and Archival Studies. He read Archaeology and History at the University of Southampton, before training as an archivist at the University of Liverpool. His archival career saw him working with collections from the twelfth century to the present day, including the archives of two Oxford colleges (Magdalen and Corpus Christi), and he spent much of his career as an archivist and curator at the University of Southampton Library, before joining the History Department in 2013.
Chris has a long-standing interest in the history of the everyday, particularly in the medieval period in England, in the ways in which documents of all ages work, and in editing texts. His early archival work in Oxford included discoveries of medieval domestic accounts, which were formative in developing his research into types of archival documents and daily life more generally. Publications on medieval social and economic history include two volumes of household accounts edited for the British Academy’s Records of Social and Economic History series, an edition of the testamentary records of the bishops of England and Wales for the Canterbury and York Society, and three books with Yale University Press: The Great Household in Late Medieval England, The Senses in Late Medieval England, and The Culture of Food in England, 1200‒1500. With Barbara Harvey, he edited The States of the Manors of Westminster Abbey, c.1300‒1422, published by the British Academy in 2019, which prints 75 overall accounts for the properties of one of the greatest landowners of medieval England either side of the Black Death.
Chris has been the editor of the Journal of Medieval History since 2009 - the journal publishes articles 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.
Chris was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2020.