Jonathan Healey

Jonathan Healey completed his doctorate at Magdalen College, Oxford in 2008 and since then has held posts at Magdalen, the Universities of Hertfordshire and Cambridge, and St Hilda’s College, Oxford, before being elected to a fellowship at St Catherine’s in 2010. His doctoral thesis, on poverty and the early development of social welfare in early-modern Lancashire, was awarded the Thirsk-Feinstein Dissertation Prize for 2008 by the Economic History Society.

Jonathan Healey’s research encompasses several aspects of English social and economic history from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, focusing in particular on the long-term development of the English economy and state, on rural history, and on the history popular politics. He has published on the development, politics and economic context of the Poor Law, on changing social structures in the Lake District, and on the epidemics of 1727-30.

Current research includes work on early-modern economic crises and famine, on the politics of common resources, and on the changing relationship between village politics and the centralizing early-modern state. He also maintains an active interest in late-medieval and early-modern India, and is working on the seventeenth-century origins of British militarism in the East.