Our People
The History of Law and Governance Centre (HLGC) is an interdisciplinary research centre hosted in the School of Law. The HLGC provides a focal point for leading interdisciplinary research into historical aspects of law and governance and a forum for discussion and collaboration between academics working in this area.
Membership of the HLGC is open to academic staff and postgraduate students with relevant research interests across the University of Nottingham. People who are interested in becoming a member are warmly encouraged to email Dr Will Eves (will.eves@nottingham.ac.uk).
Co-Directors
Will Eves
Dr Will Eves is an Assistant Professor in Law at the University of Nottingham. His research focuses on law and legal practice in the medieval period, particularly the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries in England and Normandy.
Edward Goodwin
Dr Edward Goodwin is an Associate Professor in Law at the University of Nottingham. His research interests focus on environmental, land and heritage law. His research has included the historical development of the 'wise use' principle in international environmental law and he is currently developing a research project on the legal impacts of field enclosures in the early modern period.
Sarah White
Dr Sarah White is an Assistant Professor in Law at the University of Nottingham. Her research interests combine law, history, and religion, particularly as pertains to the historical development of English ecclesiastical law, Common Law, and the courts of equity in the medieval period.
Members
Sara Arapiles
Dr Sara Arapiles is a Teaching Associate in EU Law and Public Law at the University of Nottingham. Her research focuses on public international law, international refugee law and human rights, and more specifically on the right not to be held in slavery and the international protection needs of slavery survivors.
Sascha Auerbach
Dr Sascha Auerbach in an Associate Professor in Modern British and Global History. His work concerns law and governance in the context of imperialism and colonialism, with a particular interest in race and labour in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Stephen Bailey
Professor Stephen Bailey is a Professor of Public Law at the University of Nottingham. His professional interest in legal history is rather narrow, and has involved archival research into the background to some legislation in tort and to some leading cases (mostly 20th century) on judicial review and tort.
Peter Bartlett
Professor Peter Bartlett is a Professor of Mental Health Law at the University of Nottingham. His particular interests are on law and poverty in the late modern period (ie roughly 18th century on), particularly the regulation of insanity.
Tony Burns
Professor Tony Burns is a Professor of Political Theory at the University of Nottingham. His research interests include natural law theory and the part which the concept of natural law has had to play in the history of political thought. His work in this area operates at the boundary between the disciplines if politics, ethics and jurisprudence.
William Daniel
Dr William Daniel is an Associate Professor in Comparative Politics at the University of Nottingham. He has a particular interest in politicians’ personal characteristics and identities and substantive expertise in legislative politics in the European Union. As a political scientist, he explores the impact of institutional (such as legal) developments on governance.
Phil Davies
Dr Phil Davies is an Assistant Professor in Ancient Greek History at the University of Nottingham. His principal area of research is the ancient city-state of Sparta, in particular Spartan legal, political, and governmental institutions, and their impacts in structuring Spartan society.
Gwilym Dodd
Dr Gwilym Dodd is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Nottingham and a historian of late medieval English politics, political culture and government. He has published extensively on the subject of late medieval petitioning and the mechanisms of discretionary justice which developed in England from the 13th century.
Stephen Farrall
Professor Stephen Farrall is Professor of Criminology at the University of Nottingham. He is interested in recent British political history (since the early 1970s) and its impact on crime, the criminal justice system and the life-courses of people living and growing up in Britain.
David Gehring
Dr David Gehring is an Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Nottingham. His research engages with religion, politics, and international relations in sixteenth-century Europe, with particular emphasis on how different Protestant groups found common ground in opposition to Catholicism.
Thomas Guiney
Dr Thomas Guiney is an Assistant Professor of Criminology at the University of Nottingham. Tom’s research interests include the contemporary history of criminal justice, especially as it relates to punishment, historiography and historical criminology and the politics of law and order.
Matt Hefferan
Dr Matthew Hefferan is an Assistant Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at the University of Nottingham. Matt is a historian of knighthood, politics and warfare in late medieval Europe, especially England. One of his key research interests lies with issues of corruption and abuse of the legal system by the English nobility in the fourteenth century.
Victor Kattan
Dr Victor Kattan is an Assistant Professor in Public International Law at the University of Nottingham. His research interests include: history of British colonialism in Asia and the Middle East, especially Israel/Palestine/Jordan, history of the holy places in the Holy Land, partitioned states, history of racial discrimination (especially statutory racial discrimination in the British colonies), history of apartheid in South Africa, the Cold War and its impact on the development of international human rights law.
Charlotte May
Dr Charlotte May is a Knowledge Exchange Fellow (Classics and Archaeology) and Heritage Learning Officer (Manuscripts and Special Collections) at the University of Nottingham. She is a literary historian who broadly works on unpublished documentation from the 18th and 19th centuries including the correspondence and papers of poets and politicians from this period as well as urban identity and legislative reform, with a specific interest in workhouse history and Poor Laws.
Kathryn Steenson
Kathryn Steenson is part of the team who look after the archival and rare book collections held at the University of Nottingham, with a focus on their use in teaching, research, and exhibitions.
James Thomas
Jamie Thomas is a Postgraduate Researcher in the School of Law at the University of Nottingham. His research specialises in public procurement law in the UK, and his interest in the history of law and governance stems from an observation that many questions about perceived asymmetries, quirks, or unusual features of procurement regulation can readily be answered if we stop to understand the course that procurement regulation has taken, from the late 18th century to the present day.
Connor Williams
Connor Williams is an M4C-funded Doctoral Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Nottingham. His principal research topic is the feudal incident of wardship during the 14th-to-early 15th centuries. His other research interests include the reign of Richard II, the development of administration in Medieval England, Wales and Ireland – particularly the office of the escheators, and the history of the landholding classes in the British Isles and Continental Europe.
Matt Windsor
Dr Matthew Windsor is an Associate Professor in Law at the University of Nottingham. Matthew’s research focuses on the theory and history of public international law in the 20th century, with a particular interest in the history of global economic governance, the conjuncture of decolonisation and Cold War geopolitics, and social movements engaged in prefigurative politics.