Amy Blakeway

I am a historian of sixteenth-century Scotland. For the academic year 2023-4 I held a personal research fellowship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh to research the Anglo-Scottish wars of the 1540s (the minority of Mary, Queen of Scots), including writing a monograph and delivering workshops on this subject in primary and high schools throughout Scotland. If you are a teacher or a local history/heritage group and would like to find out about this, please get in touch!

The book arising from this project, War and Governance in Scotland, 1543-1559: destruction, reconstruction and reform will appear with Edinburgh University Press in 2026. From March until September 2026 you can also find out about this at the exhibition War, Destruction and Reformation at the Wardlaw Museum in St Andrews. 

My research interests range politics with a big P (parliaments, monarchs and Scotland's relations with France and England) and a little p (propaganda, resistance and burgh communities). 

I joined St Andrews in 2019 after three years at the University of Kent, where I was Senior Lecturer in Sixteenth-Century British History and co-Director of the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Before that I held a Junior Research Fellowship at Homerton College, University of Cambridge (I also received my PhD from Cambridge in 2010). In 2011-12 I was the Fulbright Robertson Visiting Professor of British History at Westminster College in Missouri. I have held visiting research fellowships at the Huntington Library in California, at the University of Aberdeen and the University of Edinburgh's Institute for the Advanced Study of the Humanities.