BA Hons (University of Witwatersrand, South Africa)
MA (London) PhD (London)

I am a part-time (0.4FTE) senior lecturer at the University of Chichester.  I currently teach three undergraduate modules, History, Heritage and Interpretation, Renaissance & Reformation Europe, 1350-1600 (both level 1) and The Cultural History of Death (level 3).

My interest in history and heritage arises out of my work as a historian at the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum (www.wealddown.co.uk) one of the leading museums of historic buildings and rural life in the UK.  I came to the Museum in October 2005 on a Knowledge Transfer Partnership with the University of Reading to research and write the economic and social history of ten of the Museum’s exhibit houses ranging in date from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries.  This project was successfully completed in April 2008 and will be coming out as a book in late 2010 (provisionally entitled ‘People and houses in south east England 1300-1900’).  I now have a broad remit at the Museum to strengthen the historic content of its Education and Interpretation programmes.

I have a BA in English and French literature (University of Witwatersrand, South Africa) and an MA in Medieval Studies (University of London).  My PhD (University of London) was on Attitudes to Death in England, c.1480 to 1560 and focused on the changes to beliefs and practices associated with death and dying brought about by the early English reformation.  I retain an interest in both the English reformation and death and dying but the focus of my current research is rural social history, in particular that of seventeenth-century Sussex.

I have recently joined the editorial board of Sussex Archaeological Collections.

Main publications

Monographs

(With A Miles and W White), Burial at the site of the parish church of St Benet Sherehog before and after the Great Fire: Excavations at 1 Poultry, City of London (MoLAS, 2008).

Articles and essays

‘The Reformation of the Deathbed in Mid Sixteenth-Century England’, Mortality, 8, no.3 (2003), 251-267.

‘Protestantism, the Johnson Family and the 1551 Sweat in London’, The London Journal, 29, no.2 (2004), 1-16.

‘Defining Death in Early Tudor England’, Cultural & Social History, 3, no. 1 (2006), 1-20.

‘The Johnson Family and the Reformation, 1542-52’, Historical Research, 80 (2007), 469-490.

‘Reformation in the parishes: St Mary le Bow and its associated parishes’ in M Byrne and G R Bush (eds), St Mary le Bow: A History (Barnsley, 2007), 119-152.

‘Graffham and Woolavington potters, tile-makers and brickmakers, c.1590-1740’, Sussex Archaeological Collections 146 (2008), 175-188.

‘The regulation of cottage building in seventeenth-century Sussex’, forthcoming in Agricultural History Review.