The CWD has appointed Dr John Marshall as the inaugural CWD Early Career Fellow.

Inaugurated in 2024, the CWD Early Career Fellowship supports the most promising postdoctoral researchers working in fields within the CWD's remit. The Fellowship provides holders with an academic home in the CWD's dynamic research environment, offers opportunities for career development, and fuels exciting new research in the fields of war and diplomacy across disciplines and historical periods.

The CWD Early Career Fellow 2024-25 is Dr John Marshall. John was previously the Royal Historical Society Centenary Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, London. He completed his PhD at Trinity College Dublin, after obtaining a BA and MA in history from Dublin City University. John's research analyses transnational networks and expressions of power in medieval Britain and Ireland, with a particular focus on relations between the Plantagenets kings of England and the nobility and other powerful dynasts within their dominions such as the Irish kings and Welsh princes. He has published on aspects of his research in History and Irish Historical Studies, as well as editing primary source material for Analecta Hibernica and Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Sources.

CWD Director, Dr Sophie Thérèse Ambler, said: 'Across its programme, the CWD supports innovative and rigorous research into war and diplomacy by scholars at every career stage, from undergraduates to masters and doctoral researchers, and senior scholars and practitioners. The establishment of our Early Career Fellowship takes forward this commitment at postdoctoral level. The Fellowship allows us to nurture exciting emerging scholars and offers our students and members the chance to benefit from their fresh insights.'

'We're thrilled to welcome Dr John Marshall to the CWD. His research offers perceptive new insights into the military and political systems of governmental power at a time, between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, when the geo-political structure of western Europe was shifting dramatically. In the case of the English crown, it first built a vast cross-Channel dominion that stretched from Hadrian’s Wall to the Pyrenees and westward into Ireland, then lost most its continental territory to the French crown, before targeting Wales and Scotland to forge a new empire in mainland Britain. Both the king and his political-military elite held territories across multiple polities, and the structures they established - from personnel to military resourcing, and judicial and financial systems - underpinned their rule.'

'John's analysis, founded on insights from across disciplines and rigorous archival research, is helping us understand these structures in new ways.'