Ruth Nugent: Postgraduate Research at University of Chester 2010/2011
As a mature student, Ruth received her first-class undergraduate degree in Archaeology from Chester
in 2010 and was delighted to receive the Bluecoat Archaeology and Heritage award as valedictorian,
and the Society for Medieval Archaeology’s John Hurst prize for the ‘most original contribution to
medieval archaeology by an undergraduate dissertation’.
Ruth is currently completing a one-year MPhil at Chester under the supervision of Professor Howard
Williams in which her thesis, Heads and Tails: Corporeal Boundaries in the Early Anglo-Saxon
Mortuary Arena, explores how AD 5th-7thcentury communities in England understood and
reacted to death, decay and the bodies/corpses of humans and animals, and thus seeks to
illuminate broader concepts of time and memory, afterlife and cosmology, animal-human
relationships and what it meant to be human in this fascinating era.
As of November 2011, Ruth will be completing a Leverhulme Fellowship-funded PhD
entitled The Archaeology of Burial and Commemoration at Five English Cathedrals as part of a joint
project between the Universities of Chester (Archaeology) and Exeter (English), where her research
interests in death, burial and identities of the cadaver will be explored across a far wider span of
history from medieval origins to modern day archaeological interventions in cathedral burial space.
Ruth was involved in the Pillar of Eliseg excavation (2010) and has been Project Supervisor
for two post-medieval grave/churchyard surveys in Devon and Chester. She is currently coorganising an interdisciplinary conference entitled Embodiment: Representation, Exploration and
Destruction of the body at the University of Chester for 2012.
Publications
Nugent, R. 2012 (in press) Feathered Funerals: Birds in Early Anglo-Saxon Burials.
Medieval Archaeology 55.
Nugent, R. 2012 (in press) Review: The Archaeology of the East Anglian Conversion. By
Richard Hoggett, Archaeological Journal, 167.
Nugent, R. (in prep.) Home Comforts? Exploring Death as Hypersomnia in early AngloSaxon Burials.
Nugent, R. (in prep.) Heads and Tails: The destruction and re-creation of animal-human
boundaries in early medieval funerary rites.
Conference Papers
Nugent, R. 2011. Anglo-Saxon Masculinities. Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference,
University of Chester.
Nugent, R. 2011. “I got soul, but I’m not a soldier”: The “other” Anglo-Saxon male and his
corpse. Early Medieval Student Symposium, University of Glasgow.