Our People

Dr Paul Barnwell

Emerita/Emeritus Fellow, Fellow

Department for Continuing Education

BA, MA, PhD (Leeds), MA (Oxon, by resolution)

paul.barnwell@kellogg.ox.ac.uk

Paul Barnwell was formerly Director of Studies in the Historic Environment at the Department for Continuing Education, and Fellow Librarian at Kellogg College. Before coming to Oxford, he worked for the former Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England and for English Heritage. From 2002 to 2008 he was an Honorary Visiting Fellow in the History Department, and a Research Associate of the Centre for Medieval Studies, at the University of York. From 2002 to 2008 he was an Honorary Visiting Fellow in the History Department, and a Research Associate of the Centre for Medieval Studies, at the University of York.

His principal research interests are twofold: the ways in which buildings and landscapes were perceived and used by past generations, and the administrative and legal aspects of the transition from the Roman Empire to the medieval world. The main focus of his current research concerns to the way in which the evolution of English parish churches relates to the ways in which such buildings were used and experienced by ordinary parishioners from the Anglo-Saxon period to the Reformation. He is also editing a series of ten volumes on ‘Places of Worship in Britain and Ireland’ from prehistory to the present, in the series Rewley House Studies in the Historic Environment, published by Shaun Tyas, of which he is the general editor.

From 1996 to 2012 he contributed the chapter on late antiquity and the early middle ages to the Historical Association’s Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature. He is a member of the editorial boards of Northern History and Vernacular Architecture, and a former member of the Peer Review Panel of the Victoria County History. He is a past president of the Vernacular Architecture Group and a former chairman of the Brixworth Archaeological Research Committee; is a member of the councils of the British Record Society and the Ecclesiological Society; and has previously served on the committees of the British Academy Hearth Tax Project, the British Archaeological Association, the Historic Farm Buildings Group, the Yorkshire Archaeological and Historical Society, and the Yorkshire Architectural and York Archaeological Society, as well on as the York Archaeological Forum.