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Staff profile

staff list  BackDr Charles Insley

  • Job title: Senior Lecturer
  • Dept: History and American Studies
  • Tel: 01227 454700 ext 26
  • Campus: Canterbury
 

Academic/Personal Background      

Charles Insley became a historian because it was an indoor job with no heavy lifting. His interest in the Middle Ages was stimulated by Michael Wood’s wonderful TV series ‘In Search of the Dark Ages’: from then he has never looked back. He studied as an undergraduate and postgraduate at Worcester College Oxford and was awarded his D.Phil. for his thesis on Anglo-Saxon Devon in 1998. He has taught at the Universities of Oxford, Southampton, Bangor and Northampton. Prior to being made an offer he could not refuse by Christ Church, Dr Insley spent seven years working for the Victoria County History of Northamptonshire, first as assistant editor then as county editor. Rumours that he supports Coventry City football club are completely untrue.

Undergraduate Teaching Responsibilities

Level 4 (Year 1): “Britain in the Roman World”, and “The Sword, the Book and the Plough: The Origins of the Medieval World” 

Level 5 (Year 2): “Heroes and Holy Men: Britain in the Age of the Vikings, 750-1050” and the linked module, “Themes in Viking Age History”

Level 6 (Year 3): “The England of Lancaster and York, 1377-1509” and the linked module, “Sources, Society and Politics in Fifteenth-Century England”

Dr Insley will also supervise undergraduate dissertations on aspects of British medieval history, 800-1500.  

Research Interests    

Dr Insley’s research focuses on British history between the 10th and 13th centuries. He has worked extensively on medieval charters, both from England and Wales and from this has moved on to look at questions of identity, political communities and ‘the state’ in England and Wales during this period. His most recent work includes articles on the construction of memory and identity at Exeter Cathedral in the eleventh century and the documentary culture of Anglo-Saxon lay society. His forthcoming work includes an edition of the Anglo-Saxon charters of Exeter Cathedral, to be published by Oxford University Press and he is completing a biography of the first king of England, Athelstan (924-939).

Recent Publications 

  • ‘Rhetoric and Ritual in Late Anglo-Saxon Charters’ in P. Barnwell and M. Mostert (eds.) Medieval Legal Process: Physical, Spoken and Written Performance in the Middle Ages (Brepols 2011)
  • Cathedrals, Communities and Conflict in the Anglo-Norman World, ed. P. Dalton, C. Insley and L. Wilkinson (Boydell and Brewer, 2011)
  • ‘Remembering Communities Past: Exeter Cathedral in the Eleventh Century’ in Dalton, Insley and Wilkinson (eds.), Cathedrals. Communities and Conflict in the Anglo-Norman World
  •  ‘Southumbria’ in P. Stafford (ed.), A Companion to the Early Middle Ages: Britain and Ireland c.500-c.1100 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)
  •  ‘Kings, Lords, Charters, and the Political Culture of 12th Century Wales’, Anglo-Norman Studies 30 (2008)