Hannah Skoda is Fellow and Tutor in Medieval History at St John’s college in Oxford, where she researches the social and cultural history of the later Middle Ages. She is particularly interested in the ways in which people have responded to challenges and suffering – oppression, violence, and extreme change – and her teaching often explores these questions across time.

She is the author of a monograph on medieval violence (Oxford, 2012), which won the Society for Feminist Scholarship First Book Prize; she has won a Leverhulme prize, and British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. She is committed to working towards gender equality. For five years, she was coordinator of the Athena Swan accreditation charter in History at Oxford, as well as a co-director of the Centre for Women, Gender, Identity and Queer Studies.

Much of Hannah’s work addresses audiences beyond academia. She was the Principal Investigator on a funded project run collaboratively with Historic Royal Palaces and Royal Armouries, about torture at the Tower of London. She has also written for History Today, The Times Literary Supplement, and History Magazine, and has recorded podcasts with History Extra on subjects including childbirth and breastfeeding in the Middle Ages, as well as a regular feature entitled ‘History Behind the Headlines.’ She has also presented on History Hit, BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 and occasionally on TV.