Meet the Team
Zara Adaci is Associate Head of History at Claremont High School.
Vicky is currently Second in the History and Politics Department at North London Collegiate School where she has recently led on the introduction of a Global Medieval Women Unit for Year 7. Vicky is delighted to be part of the Teaching Medieval Women project; she hosted the inaugural CPD day in Summer 2023 at NLCS and looks forward to promoting the project at future conferences.
Dr Rhonwen Bruce is the PGCE Secondary Programme Leader and History PGCE Course Leader at Edge Hill University, with a research background in history education, curriculum reform, and the representation of marginalised histories. She works closely with schools and national education bodies to support subject-specific teacher development and is particularly interested in how beginning teachers learn to think historically in the classroom.
Rhonwen combines academic insight with practical expertise to champion rich, meaningful history education rooted in disciplinary integrity.
Natasha Hodgson is Associate Professor in History and Director of the Centre for Research in History, Heritage and Memory Studies (CRHHMS) at Nottingham Trent University in the UK. Her research has focused mainly on the medieval and early modern periods, with a special interest in medieval women, gender, masculinities, histories of religious warfare, and social and cultural history.
She also has interests in Digital Humanities and worked on major AHRC projects such as the Hull Electronic Domesday (now opendomesday.org) and PASE (the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England). She is the author of Women, Crusading and the Holy Land in Historical Narrative (Boydell, 2017), and a co-editor of Crusading and Masculinities (2019); Religion and Conflict in Medieval and Early Modern Worlds (2020), and Miracles, Political Authority and Violence in Medieval and Early Modern History (2021). She is an editor of the journal Nottingham Medieval Studies and the Routledge series’ Themes in Medieval and Early Modern History and Advances in Crusade Studies.
Steve Illingworth has been a secondary school history teacher, local authority educational consultant and university lecturer in teacher training. Now semi-retired, he works part-time on the secondary PGCE course at the University of Cumbria. He devised and contributed a teaching resource to the Teaching Medieval Women website in 2025 called An historian’s approach to the importance of medieval women and in the same year delivered a presentation to the TMW conference in Nottingham on the role of teacher training in diversifying the school curriculum.
Sam Jones leads the History Department at Bolder Academy in Isleworth, West London. He’s been teaching in the Hounslow Borough for almost a decade, during which time has been involved in developing other, under-represented areas in UK school history curriculums locally and nationally, most notably, BAME history. After being inspired at a fantastic WOMED conference himself, Sam is delighted to be working towards addressing the under-representation of medieval women’s history in UK schools
Jonathan Phillips is Professor of Crusading History at Royal Holloway, University of London. His most recent book was The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin (2019). Earlier titles include: Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades (2009); The Second Crusade: Extending the Frontiers of Christendom (2007); The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (2004). He is co-editor, with Dr Iris Shagrir and Professor Benjamin Kedar, of the academic journal Crusades and in August 2021 was elected President of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East. He is the General Editor of the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Crusades, 2 volumes, 2024/25. He teaches a highly popular undergraduate course, ‘She-Wolves: Female Royal Power across the Medieval World, c.1000-c.1400’ at Royal Holloway.
Jake Unwin is a Head of History at Sutton High School and the Trust Consultant Teacher for the Humanities for the Girls Day School Trust (a family of 25 girls’ schools across England and Wales). He has been teaching History for over a decade.
He is privileged to see daily the impact of girls-centred teaching in a girls’ school network and is delighted to collaborate with TMW in helping see the oft-forgotten or overlooked 50% of women in History taught more effectively.
Gilly Walker was Head of History at Peter Symonds College in Winchester.
Dr Elena (Ellie) Woodacre is a Reader in Renaissance History at the University of Winchester. She is a specialist in queenship and royal studies and has published extensively in this area including her recent monographs, Queens and Queenship (ARC, 2021) and Joan of Navarre: Infanta, Duchess, Queen, Witch? (Routledge, 2022).
Elena is the organizer of the ‘Kings & Queens’ conference series, founder of the Royal Studies Network, Editor-in-Chief of the Royal Studies Journal, the editor of two book series with Routledge and ARC Humanities Press and a general editor of the Winchester University Press. She is also leading an international project entitled ‘Examining the Resources and Revenues of Premodern European Royal Women’, with a team of colleagues in Germany, Portugal and the UK. Dr Woodacre regularly engages with international media on current events connected with monarchical history and featured in the documentary series Queens that Changed the World.