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Department of History

Dr Annabel Hancock

Dr Annabel Hancock
Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Funded by a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship

I'm a historian of trust, trade, movement, identity, and documentary cultures in the Medieval Mediterranean. As well as being interested in the ways in which culture, identity, and religion affected human interaction and trust formation, I also work in digital humanities, exploring how digital methods, such as network analysis and database building and analysis, can expand and enhance historical research.

My postdoctoral research explores the ways in which enslavement and slave trading interacted with trust formation, looking to understand the economic and social impacts of slavery and enslaved individuals in medieval Catalonia, 1200-1400.

I received my DPhil in 2025 from St John’s College, Oxford, and conducted my research under the supervision of Professor Ian Forrest and Professor Julia Smith, co-funded by the OOC AHRC DTP, St John’s College, and the Clarendon Fund. I am also proud to have been elected a Beeston Scholar for Research Excellence at St John’s College (2021-23).

My DPhil thesis explored the formation of trust between groups of merchants and investors in Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca in the 13th to 14th centuries. This stems from an interest in how and why group identities were formed, the ways in which groups reacted to ‘others’, and how trust/distrust was constructed and maintained within and between identity groups (including religion, gender, and citizenship). By focusing on sources related to long-distance traders in the Crown of Aragon, I developed a framework for studying trust in the past. I am now working to convert my DPhil thesis into a monograph, under contract with the New Historical Perspectives series of the Royal Historical Society of the United Kingdom.

I gained a BA in History from Oriel College, Oxford, in 2018 and an MA in Medieval Studies in 2019 at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York, funded by the centre’s Anniversary Scholarship. I spent part of the 2025-26 academic year as a Visiting Research Scholar at the Department of History, University of Maryland.

I was Lecturer in Medieval History at Oriel College for two years, 2022-2024, and acted as a Graduate Outreach Tutor for the History Faculty at the University of Oxford for three years, 2020-2023. As part of this role, I delivered an outreach presentation titled 'Trust between traders in Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca, 1240-1350' as part of the Historia Lectures series and wrote an outreach article on 'Medieval Mediterranean Communities and Movement 1150-1350'.

I was a lead organiser of the interdisciplinary conference ‘Trust in the Premodern World’, which took place in the History Faculty, 13-14th January 2023. Reports on the conference for  OMS and the Past and Present Society.

I was also co-organiser of the workshop 'Scales of Governance: Local Agency and Political Authority in Eurasia, 1000-1500', which took place in Worcester College, Oxford, 12-13th January 2024. Report on the workshop for OMS.

Publications

Edited Volumes

Journal Articles

  • Hancock, Annabel Laura, “The Relativity of Fides: Faith Language, Commerce and Interreligious Trust in the Crown of Aragon, c. 1240–1350,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, published online (July 2025): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0080440125100273.
  • Hancock, Annabel Laura, "Trust and the Jews of Sijilmassa in Mallorca, 1240–1256," Aschkenas 35:2 (November 2025): 265-315. https://doi.org/10.1515/asch-2025-2014
  • Hancock, A.L., “Tracing Connections: Using Network Analysis to Study Trade and Movement in the Mediterranean in the Eleventh to Fourteenth Centuries,” Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 38:4, (December 2023), 1536-1563: https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqad056
  • Hancock, J.T., D. Veal, and A.L. Hancock, “Network theory and the resilience of redox signaling.” Reactive Oxygen Species, 8:23, (2019): 245-257.

Media Engagement

Contact Details

Department of History
Trinity College
Dublin 2.

Email: hancocka@tcd.ie