John Blair FSA FBA
Blair in 2021
Born	William John Blair (1955-03-04)4 March 1955 (age 70) Woking,Surrey, England
Title	Professor of Medieval History and Archaeology
Spouse	Kanerva Blair-Heikkinen ​ ​ (m. 2005)​
Parent	Claude Blair
Academic background
Alma mater	Brasenose College, Oxford
Thesis	Landholding, Church and Settlement in Surrey before 1300 (1983)
Doctoral advisor	Barbara Harvey
Academic work
Discipline	History archaeology
Sub-discipline	Early medieval English history
Institutions	The Queen's College, Oxford

William John Blair,FSA, FBA (born 4 March 1955) is an English historian,archaeologist, and academic, who specialises inAnglo-Saxon England. He isEmeritus Professor of Medieval History and Archaeology at theUniversity of Oxford, and a Fellow ofThe Queen's College, Oxford. He gave the 2013Ford Lectures at the University of Oxford.

Blair was born on 4 March 1955 inWoking, Surrey, England.^[1] His father wasClaude Blair, a museum curator and "one of the foremost authorities on historic European metalwork, especially arms and armour",^[2] and his mother was Joan Mary Greville Blair (née Drinkwater).^[1]

Blair was educated atSt John's School, Leatherhead, aprivate school inLeatherhead, Surrey.^[1] He then studied atBrasenose College, Oxford, graduating with afirst-classBachelor of Arts (BA) degree in 1976.^[1] He remained at Brasenose College to undertakepostgraduate research and completed hisDoctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree in 1983.^[1][3] Hisdoctoral thesis was titledLandholding, Church and Settlement in Surrey before 1300: this subsequently became the basis of his first book,Early Medieval Surrey (1991).^[4]

During his doctoral research, Blair was aJunior Research Fellow atBrasenose College, Oxford.^[3] In 1981, he was elected aFellow ofThe Queen's College, Oxford.^[1][3] Since then, he has been apraelector andtutor in history at the college.^[1] On 1 October 2006, he was awarded aTitle of Distinction by theUniversity of Oxford as Professor of Medieval History and Archaeology.^[5] He retired in October 2020 and was made an emeritus fellow of The Queen's College.^[6]

Blair gave the 2013Ford Lectures at the University of Oxford.^[7] The lecture series was titled "Building the Anglo-Saxon Landscape".^[8]

On 5 May 1983, Blair was electedFellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (FSA).^[9] He was electedFellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 2008.^[10]

In 2005, Blair married Kanerva Heikkinen. Together they have two children; one daughter and one son.^[1]

Scholia has anauthor profile forJohn Blair (historian).

• Blair, John (1991).Early Medieval Surrey: Landholding, Church and Settlement before 1300. Gloucester: Alan Sutton Publishing.ISBN 978-0-86299-780-9.
• Blair, John (1994).Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire. Oxford, Stroud and Dover, NH: Oxfordshire Books and Alan Sutton Publishing.ISBN 978-0-7509-0147-5.
• Blair, John (2000).The Anglo-Saxon Age: a very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.ISBN 978-0-19-285403-2.
• Blair, John (2005).The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.ISBN 978-0-19-822695-6.
• Blair, John, ed. (2007).Waterways and Canal-building in Medieval England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.ISBN 978-0-19-921715-1.
• Blair, John (2013).The British Culture of Anglo-Saxon Settlement. Cambridge: Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic.ISBN 978-0-9571862-9-3.
• Lapidge, Michael; Blair, John;Keynes, Simon; Scragg, Donald, eds. (2014).The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England (2nd ed.). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.ISBN 978-0-470-65632-7.
• Blair, John (2018).Building Anglo-Saxon England. Princeton: Princeton University Press.ISBN 9780691162980.
• Blair, John; Rippon, Stephen; Smart, Christopher (2020).Planning in the Early Medieval Landscape. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press.ISBN 978-1-78962-116-7.
• Blair, John (2025).Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.ISBN 978-0691224794.

• 1955 births
• Living people
• People educated at St John's School, Leatherhead
• Alumni of Brasenose College, Oxford
• British medievalists
• Anglo-Saxon studies scholars
• English archaeologists
• Historians of the University of Oxford
• English male non-fiction writers
• Fellows of the British Academy
• Fellows of the Queen's College, Oxford
• Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of London
• Contributors to the Victoria County History
• 21st-century English historians
• 20th-century English historians
• 21st-century English male writers
• 20th-century English male writers

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• Short description matches Wikidata
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