MSRG President 2024-2026
Dawn Hadley is Professor of Medieval Archaeology at the University of York, where she moved in 2018 after over 20 years working in Sheffield.
She is well known for her work on the Danelaw and the Scandinavian impact on the settlements, society, and culture of that region. Over the last decade she has been working with her colleague Prof. Julian Richards on the late ninth-century camp of the Viking Great Army at Torksey in Lincolnshire. Their fieldwork has also addressed the development of the town that emerged in the wake of the overwintering, where a major pottery industry was founded. They have also been exploring the wider impact of the Great Army on settlements in eastern England and have a new book with OUP on Life in the Viking Great Army: raiders, traders, and settlers (2024).
In 2020 she published Sheffield Castle: Archaeology, Archives, Regeneration, 1927-2018 (White Rose University Press), with her former Sheffield colleague Prof. John Moreland, examining the enduring legacy of medieval settlement on a modern city. Her research interests also include gender, childhood and digital heritage, and in her work she has promoted the value of Open Access publication and the importance of making datasets from fieldwork available online for the purposes of encouraging the development of new projects.
Medieval Settlement Research Group 