Dr Stephen Mileson

 

Departmental Lecturer in Lifelong Learning (Local History and Archaeology)

Biography

Dr Stephen Mileson became a Departmental Lecturer in Local History and Archaeology in 2024 after teaching at the Department for Continuing Education for several years. He is also a contributor to the Oxfordshire Victoria County History and serves as the editor of the county history and archaeology journal Oxoniensia. Previously, he was a College Lecturer at St Edmund Hall and a Research Fellow in the History Faculty. Stephen is dedicated to widening participation in history and archaeology and has worked extensively with local groups on fieldwork projects. He has also shared his research through podcasts, radio shows, and popular publications.

Teaching

Stephen teaches a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate history and archaeology courses, with a focus on the Middle Ages and landscape studies. He previously directed the Diploma in English Social and Local History and the Diploma/Advanced Diploma in British Archaeology. Over the years, he has greatly enjoyed teaching short courses for the Oxford Experience summer school at Christ Church. Stephen is eager to hear from postgraduate research students working on medieval social and landscape history.

Research interests

Stephen's research primarily focuses on medieval social history, particularly how ordinary people perceived their environment and sense of place. He is currently working on two related projects: the social role of rural free tenants in England before the Black Death, and the relationship between landscape and local identities. His earlier work on perceptions of landscape in South Oxfordshire over the long period of 500-1650 was funded by the Leverhulme Trust and resulted in a major monograph published by OUP in 2021, a Past and Present article on “Openness and Closure in the Later-Medieval Village” (2017), and a chapter on “Sound and Landscape” in the Oxford Handbook of Later Medieval Archaeology (2018). Stephen’s first book, on the significance of medieval deer parks as expressions of aristocratic values, explored the responses of peasants and townsmen to often controversial lordly enclosures of woods, pastures, and arable land (OUP, 2009; paperback 2014).

Selected publications

Books

Peasant Perceptions of Landscape: Ewelme Hundred, South Oxfordshire, 500-1650, with S. Brookes (OUP, 2021), shortlisted for the Current Archaeology Research Project of the Year, 2022

The Archaeology of Oxford in the 21st Century (Boydell & Brewer, 2020), edited with Anne Dodd and Leo Webley

Parks in Medieval England (OUP, 2009; paperback 2014)

Articles/book chapters

Numerous VCH Oxfordshire parish histories, including most recently Chipping Norton (communications, urban development, buildings), Hook Norton and Swerford (2024), and Caversham, Eye and Dunsden, Mapledurham, Shiplake (2022)

‘Restoring Mapledurham: A South Oxfordshire Estate and Its Buildings, 1960-2019’, with D. Miles, Oxoniensia, 87 (2022), pp. 105-26

‘Living Like Common People: Uncovering Medieval Peasant Perceptions of Landscape’, Current Archaeology, 381 (2021), pp. 26-33

‘Royal and Aristocratic Landscapes of Pleasure’, in C. Gerrard and A. Gutiérrez (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Later Medieval Archaeology in Britain, OUP (2018), pp. 386-400

‘Sound and Landscape’, in Gerrard and Gutiérrez, The Oxford Handbook of Later Medieval Archaeology, pp. 713-27

‘Openness and Closure in the Later Medieval Village’, Past and Present, 234 (Feb. 2017), pp. 3-37

 ‘Beyond the Dots: Mapping Meaning in the Later Medieval Landscape’, in M. Hicks (ed.), The Later Medieval Inquisitions Post Mortem: Mapping the Medieval Countryside and Rural Society (2016), pp. 84-99

‘People and Houses in South Oxfordshire, 1300-1650’, Vernacular Architecture, 46 (2015), pp. 8-25

‘A Multi-Phase Anglo-Saxon Site in Ewelme’, Oxoniensia, 79 (2014), pp. 1-29, with S. Brookes