TWO history experts have taken top jobs at the University of Huddersfield.

Dr Glenn Foard and Prof Richard Morris, OBE, are the latest academics to join the staff at the Queensgate campus.

Prof Morris joins the university following seven years at near neighbour, the University of Leeds, where he was the director of the Institute for Medieval Studies.

He has also served as director of the Council for British Archaeology, where he helped launch the popular magazine British Archaeology.

A historian and archaeologist, Prof Morris’s wide-ranging interests include settlement and landscape, historical topography, churches and religious communities, the archaeological study of buildings and 20th-century military aviation.

He is the author, co-author and co-editor of a number of books, including Churches in the Landscape (1989) and well regarded biographies of Guy Gibson (1994) and Leonard Cheshire (2000). He is currently working on the biography of Barnes Wallis.

Dr Foard, an adviser to the Battlefields Trust on archaeology and a member of the English Heritage Battlefields Panel, joins the department as reader in Battlefield Archaeology.

Having researched and written extensively on the archaeology and history of battles and sieges of the medieval and early-modern periods in the UK, his books include, Naseby: The Decisive Campaign ( Pryor Publications, 1995) and Edgehill 1642: The Archaeology of a Battle (Archaeopress, forthcoming).

He is completing a five year investigation which has located the true site of Bosworth battlefield and out of which has developed a major new strand of archaeologically-led collaborative research into the origins of firepower.