Meet the research team

Further Information

Professor John Harper, Principal Investigator, is Research Professor in Music and Liturgy and Director of the International Centre for Sacred Music Studies. He is also Emeritus Director of The Royal School of Church Music. He has wide experience of music and liturgy as a practitioner (St Chad’s Cathedral, Birmingham, Edington Priory, Magdalen College, Oxford) and served for seven years as a consultant member of the Church of England Liturgical Commission. He is the author of the standard book, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the 10th to the 18th century.

Dr Sally Harper, Co-Investigator, is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Music and Director of the Centre of Advanced Welsh Music Studies (CAWMS). She has researched and published widely on music in medieval and early modern Wales and on medieval liturgy, and has authored monographs on medieval English Benedictine liturgy (1994) and on Music in Welsh Culture before 1650 (2007). She is co-director of the Bangor Pontifical Project, and recently led another AHRC research project on the performance of medieval vernacular verse in Wales, Ireland and Scotland.

Dr Paul Barnwell, Researcher, is Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford, University Lecturer in the Historic Environment, and Director of Studies for the Department for Continuing Education’s historic environment and architectural history programmes. Formerly Head of Medieval and Later Rural Research Policy, Research and Standards Strategy Department at English Heritage, he is also a past President of the Vernacular Architecture Group and has been an Honorary Visiting Fellow in the Department of History at the University of York. He has published widely on English architectural history from the Anglo–Saxon period to the present day and his principal current research interest concerns the ways in which English parish churches can contribute to understanding medieval religious life and experience.

Dr Katharine Olson, Researcher, was until recently Honorary Postdoctoral Fellow in Celtic Studies and History at Harvard University and Sir John Rhŷs Scholar in Celtic Studies, Jesus College, Oxford, before being appointed British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in Medieval and Early Modern History at Bangor University in 2008. She has received several recent academic awards, including the Charlotte Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship in Religious and Ethical Studies from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Schallek Fellowship for Dissertation Research Abroad in Late Medieval British History, awarded by the Medieval Academy of America and the Richard III Society. She has published several items within the area of popular piety in Wales and the Marches, and is currently completing a book on Local Contexts of Change: Popular Religion, Community, and the Development of Confessional Identity in Wales, c.1500–1640.

Ms Judith Aveling, Doctoral Student, completed her first degree in Modern and Medieval Languages at Peterhouse Cambridge and has Masters degrees in Slavonic and East European Studies from London University, and in Theology and Religious Studies from Liverpool Hope and Lampeter Universities. She is passionately interested in theology, liturgy, and church music, and her PhD will focus on the theological aspect of late medieval devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus for the project, with particular focus on liturgy, music, spirituality, and social and cultural context.

Interdisciplinary Research Group

The core team is assisted by a wider group, representing two main thematic strands:

Group A: Observation and analysis of re-enactments as ritual and social phenomena
Group B: Historical Contexts