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Research interests

Duncan is a Research Associate on the Leverhulme-funded Profile of a Doomed Elite project with Stephen Baxter and Chris Lewis.

His other research interests include English place-names and personal names (he is writing a dictionary of Devon place-names for the EPNS ‘Popular Series’) and Anglo-Saxon manumissions and guilds (including the preparation of editions for those from post-Conquest Exeter). He retains an interest in the development of the early medieval Church, land-units and patterns of landscape organization (not just in Britain), but this is on the back-burner at the moment.

Biography

Duncan started out as a biomathematician and then worked as a graphic designer before devoting himself to medieval history. Following an Open University Arts Foundation at Liverpool in 1994 he did a BA in Medieval Studies at the University of Birmingham, where he also completed his PhD (on social transitions in early medieval south-western Britain) in 2002. He held a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship during 2003-6, was elected to the council of the English Place-Name Society in 2005, and was a Visiting Lecturer in Medieval History at Birmingham 2006-10.

Publications

‘The pre-Conquest lands and parish of Crediton minster, Devon’, in ed. N.J. Higham, The Anglo-Saxon Landscape (Boydell: Woodbridge, 2010 forthcoming).

‘New light on Aldhelm’s letter to king Gerent of Dumnonia’, in ed. K. Barker with N.P. Brooks, Aldhelm and Sherborne: Essays to Celebrate the Foundation of the Bishopric (Oxbow: Oxford, 2010), 110-28.

‘Two Devonshire ‘Cheritons’’, in ed. E. Quinton, The Church in English Place-Names, English Place-Name Society Extra Series 4 (Nottingham, 2009), 15-22.

‘Towards a reassessment of ‘Kingston’ place-names’, Journal of the English Place-Name Society 40 (2008), 7-22.

‘Mapping early medieval language change in south-west England’, in ed. N.J. Higham, Britons in Anglo-Saxon England (Boydell: Woodbridge, 2007), 231-44.

J. France, H.D.St C. Neal, D.W. Probert & G.E. Pollott, ‘A model for evaluating lamb production systems’, Agricultural Systems 10, 1983, 213-44.