# Hannah Skoda

Hannah Skoda (née Wheeler; born 30 June 1981) is a British historian of Europe in the late medieval period. She is Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in History at St John's College.

## Academic career

Skoda was an undergraduate and graduate student at Wadham College, Oxford, matriculating in 1998. Her doctoral thesis was supervised by Gervase Rosser and Malcolm Vale. Following the completion of her doctorate in 2008 she was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Merton College. In October 2010 she was elected to a Tutorial Fellowship at St John's College, succeeding her former supervisor Vale.
Since 2014 Skoda has served as Keeper of the Silver for St John's College, and in 2019 also became Keeper of the Laudian Vestments. Since 2020 she has also served as the Faculty of History's co-ordinator for the Athena SWAN gender equality accreditation scheme.

### Research

Skoda's first monograph, based on her doctoral thesis, was entitled Medieval Violence: Physical Brutality in Northern France, 1270-1330 and was published in 2013 by Oxford University Press as part of their Oxford Historical Monographs series.
Skoda has co-edited numerous collections of essays; the first, titled Contact and Exchange in Later Medieval Europe and dedicated to her doctoral supervisor Malcolm Vale, was co-edited with Patrick Lantschner and R. L. J. Shaw and published in 2012. Another volume, titled Legalism: Anthropology and History, co-edited with Paul Dresch, was published by Oxford University Press in 2012 as the first in a series of proceedings from the Oxford Legalism Seminar. Skoda's second editorial contribution to the series came in 2018 with the publication of Legalism: Property and Ownership, co-edited with Georgy Kantor and Thomas Lambert.
Skoda was the sole editor of the 2023 collection A Companion to Crime and Deviance in the Middle Ages, published by Arc Humanities Press. Her journal articles and book chapters have focused on subjects such as representations of disability in accounts of saints' miracles; student violence in medieval French and English universities; and the concept of nostalgia in the pre-modern world.
Skoda has held editorial positions at the journal The English Historical Review since 2018, first as a book reviews editor and then as a general editor. She currently sits on the editorial board of the Oxford Historical Monographs series for Oxford University Press.

### Media work

Skoda contributes to the blog Now and Then which explores the importance of studying history. She also hosts the monthly podcast series History Behind the Headlines for History Extra alongside Rana Mitter, in which they examine current affairs from a historian's perspective and discuss news from the historical discipline. In July 2014 Skoda appeared in an episode of the BBC Radio 4 series Making History hosted by Tom Holland, discussing the relationship between violence and justice in the medieval period.
Skoda has also written for BBC History Magazine, the Times Literary Supplement and History Today. She has taught an online introductory course on late medieval England for the History Extra Academy.

## Honours and awards

In 2014 Skoda's first monograph won the International Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship's award for Best First Book of Feminist Scholarship on the Middle Ages. She won a Philip Leverhulme Prize in recognition of the international impact of her research on violence in 2015, and in 2018 she was awarded a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship. She was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship in 2020.