Sarah Rees Jones
Emeritus Professor in History

Profile

Biography

BA (Oxon), DPhil (York), FRHistS, FSA

Sarah Rees Jones is a Professor of Medieval History.

She works on medieval urban history, with special interests in the history of citizenship and town planning. She is the author of York, the Making of a City, 1068-1350 (Oxford, 2013). Other recent publications address the processes through which collective bonds were formed in medieval towns, whether through the shaping of the lived environment, through faith or through the development of skills and bureaucratic processes.

Research

Overview

The major focus of Sarah Rees Jones’ current and future research interests is in urban society and culture in England between the Norman Conquest and the Reformation. Her monograph on York, The Making of a City 1068-1350 was published by OUP in 2013 and she recently was a major contributor the British Historic Towns Atlas, volume V, York (Oxford, 2015). She is a Trustee of the UK Historic Towns Trust. Her current focus is on the relationship between public history and social reform in the later medieval north of England in the fourteenth century. This is a major focus of a current project funded by the AHRC: 'The Northern Way: the Archbishops of York and the North of England, 1304-1405'. 

Previous research focused on the history of the City of York, particularly in the period c. 1100-1500. She has also worked in partnership with a large number of heritage organisations in the city including York Minster, the Yorkshire Museums Trust, York Explore, the York Archaeological Trust and members of the local Jewish community on a number of projects reflecting on the significance of the medieval past in the contemporary world.

She has been PI and CI on a number of externally funded projects designed to open up access to the medieval past to wider publics, including projects in Digital Humanities.

Resources available for research students in York

Sarah Rees Jones has supervised twenty successful PhD students on a range of topics relating to medieval English social and cultural history and public history.

The J.B. Morrell, King’s Manor and York Minster Libraries contain excellent collections of journals, secondary works and printed primary sources to support research in medieval English urban and rural history. The city also houses four major collections of medieval archives for the city and the northern province, including exceptionally rich collections of ecclesiastical, civic, and guild records. Other local archives contain major medieval collections for the urban and rural history of Yorkshire and the north. Students undertaking research degrees may also want to take advantage of resources both nearby both in the British Library Lending Division at nearby Boston Spa and in the archives of North Yorkshire (Northallerton) and West Yorkshire (Leeds). York has excellent communication links to libraries in Leeds, Manchester and elsewhere in the North, and is conveniently placed for research in London.