Name Janet Nelson | Role Historian | |
![]() | ||
Books The Frankish World - 75, Politics and ritual in early med, Courts - Elites - and Gendere, Rulers and ruling families i, Transactions of the Royal His Similar People Peter Linehan, Pauline Stafford, Malcolm Godden |
Dame Janet Nelson - Honorary Graduate
Dame Janet Laughland Nelson, DBE, FBA (born 28 March 1942) is a British historian. She is Emerita Professor of Medieval History at King's College London.
Contents
Biography
Nelson was educated at Keswick School, Cumbria and at Newnham College, Cambridge where she earned her BA degree in 1964 and her PhD degree in 1967.
She was appointed a Lecturer at King's College, London in 1970, promoted Reader in 1987, Professor in 1993 and Director of the Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies in 1994, retiring in 2007. She was a Vice-President of the British Academy, 2000–01, and President of the Royal Historical Society in 2000–04. She has honorary doctorates from the University of East Anglia (2004), St Andrews University (2007), Queen's University Belfast (2009), and the universities of York (2010), Liverpool (2010) and Nottingham (2010).
Her research to date has been focused on early medieval Europe, including Anglo-Saxon England. She has published widely on kingship, government, political ideas, religion and ritual, and increasingly on women and gender during this period. She was working on a biography of Charlemagne, as well as co-directing, with Simon Keynes (of Cambridge University), the AHRC-funded project Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England.
She has co-edited and/or written the following:
Nelson has also appeared on BBC television and radio, notably as an expert on the Anglo-Saxon Kings in Michael Wood's 2013 series on the subject.