Ian Atherton

Biography

I have been in the History Department at Keele since 1995, first as Lecturer and since 2003 as Senior Lecturer. Before that I was a Leverhulme Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for East Anglian Studies at the University of East Anglia for two years, working on a project to research and publish a history of Norwich Cathedral for its 900th anniversary in 1996. That work was published as Ian Atherton, Eric Fernie, Christopher Harper-Bill, and Hassell Smith, eds, Norwich Cathedral: Church, City and Diocese, 1096-1996 (Hambledon Press: London & Rio Grande, 1996).

At Keele I have fulfilled a number of roles, including School of Director of Education (2017-21), Director of Programmes for History (from 2008-2010), Director of Undergraduate Studies for History (2007), Examinations Officer for History (2001-06), and Secretary for the Humanities Faculty (2000-01).   I was External Examiner for History at Birmingham University (2006-09), and at Bangor University (2016-21) and have been on the board of Midland History since 2001.

Research and scholarship

As a historian of religion, politics and war in early modern Britain, I am working on two broad areas:

• British cathedrals in the early modern period, exploring how cathedrals were experienced and how they found roles within the wider church. I am also interested in collegiate churches, particularly Manchester and Ripon, in the same period.
• The memory of conflict. I am writing a book on the changing commemoration of British battlefields from the fourteenth century to the present day, uncovering the changing traditions of the memorialisation of war. The project includes the post-bellum fate of battlefields, customary attitudes to the fallen and to their burial, and practices in the erection of permanent memorials.