Dr Rebecca Thomas is a Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at Cardiff University. Her monograph, History and Identity in Early Medieval Wales (Cambridge, 2022), was awarded the 2022 Francis Jones Prize for Welsh History. Her other publications include the co-edited volumes Memory and Nation: Writing the History of Wales (Cardiff, 2025) and The Chronicles of Medieval Wales and the March (Turnhout, 2020). She is also a Welsh novelist and has published four historical novels for young adults. Her first novel for adults, a dystopian campus novel (Y Tŵr), was published by Sebra in 2025.
Her academic profile can be found at: https://profiles.cardiff.ac.uk/staff/thomasr165
During her time at St John’s, she will be conducting research for the project ‘Hostages in Medieval Wales’, funded by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. Hostages were a key part of making and maintaining peace in the medieval world, and Wales is a particularly compelling case study of the practice as the Welsh were frequently required to give hostages to the English. This project is the first study of hostages in texts from and relating to medieval Wales (c500–1282) and will investigate the mechanics of hostageship and its literary representation.
