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Dr Jonathan Healey

Fellow, Fellow Librarian, Official Fellow

Associate Professor in Social History

Department for Continuing Education

jonathan.healey@conted.ox.ac.uk

Jonathan Healey works on early-modern social and economic history. As well as being a Fellow of Kellogg, he is an Associate Professor in Social History in the Department for Continuing Education.

Jonathan graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford in 2003. He then studied a Master’s at Reading before returning to Magdalen, where he completed his doctorate in 2008. His doctoral thesis was awarded the Thirsk-Feinstein Dissertation Prize for 2008 by the Economic History Society. Since then he has held lectureships at Magdalen, the Universities of Hertfordshire and Cambridge, and St Hilda’s College, Oxford. He was a Fellow in History at St Catherine’s College, Oxford from 2010-12. He moved to OUDCE in 2012, and is now Course Director for the Diploma in English Local History and the online Advanced Undergraduate Diploma in Local History. He is especially keen to hear from potential Doctoral students working in English social and economic history more generally.

His first book, The First Century of Welfare: Poverty and Poor Relief in Lancashire, c. 1620-1730, was published in 2014 by The Boydell Press. It looks at a unique collection of thousands of written appeals for poor relief surviving in the Lancashire Archives, so as to understand what caused poverty in an early-modern society, and how people dealt with it. In addition to his work on poverty, he has published articles on famine, on the politics of common land in early-modern England, and on the history of the Lake District. His next major project is looking at the social history of the English East India Company, its servants, and its Asian settlements in the seventeenth century.

He is keen to foster a public engagement with social history more generally. In 2012 he was picked as one of the winners of BBC Radio 3’s New Generation Thinkers competition, and has since made a number of appearances on BBC radio. He writes a blog, which combines research, opinion and satire, and which can be read here