Aled Gruffydd Jones

Aled Gruffydd Jones (born 1955) is Sir John Williams Professor of Welsh History and Senior Pro Vice-Chancellor of Aberystwyth University.

Education and Personal Life

He was educated at Ysgol Ardudwy, Harlech, Wales, the University of York, where he met and later married the political sociologist and writer Yasmin Ali (b.1957). He holds a doctorate from the University of Warwick (1982).

He has lived and worked in Aberystwyth since being appointed by Professor Sir Rees Davies to a tutorship in Modern History in 1979, becoming in 1994 the first Head of the newly-merged Department of History and Welsh History.

In February 2013 it was announced that he was the new Chief Executive and Librarian of the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.

Contributions and Writings

In 1987 he was a co-founder and chair of the Welsh film and video arts collective, Creu Cof, and in 1989 was one of the organisers of the first Welsh International Film Festival at Aberystwyth (Identities / Hunaniaethau). He has contributed extensively to Welsh and English-language print journalism, TV and radio broadcasting

He was joint editor of the Welsh social history journal Llafur from 1986 to 1992, and Literary Director (Modern) of the Royal Historical Society, and editor of Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, from 2000 to 2004. In 2003 he succeeded Professor Kenneth O. Morgan (Baron Morgan) as editor (modern) of the Welsh History Review. From 2005 to 2007 he advised the British Library on its newspaper digitization project, and has been a member of the History panel of both the Research Assessment Exercise (2008) and the Research Excellence Framework (2014). In 2009 He was appointed a Trustee of the National Library of Wales, and in 2010 served as the Higher Education representative on the Deputy Minister’s Expert Panel on Research and Development, Welsh Assembly Government. He is a Director of the Coleg Cenedlaethol Cymraeg (the National College for Welsh Medium Learning in Higher Education)(2011). He spoke at the Hay Festival, 2011. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, the Royal Historical Society, and the Royal Asiatic Society.

Aled Jones has written on the social and cultural history of journalism, especially Press, Politics and Society. A history of journalism in Wales, University of Wales Press, 1993, and Powers of the Press. Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England, Scolar Press, 1996. He also writes on the relationship between Wales, the British Empire and the Indian sub-continent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including 'Culture, “race” and the missionary public in mid-Victorian Wales’, Journal of Victorian Culture, November 2005, and ‘The transforming gaze: the photography of Welsh Christians in Sylhet, India, 1890-1947’,Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh (Humanities), December 2004.

Publications

Notable publications by Jones include:

• (with William D. Jones) Welsh Reflections. Y Drych and America, 1851-2001, Gomer Press, Llandysul, 2001, (xiv, 198).
• Editor (with Laurel Brake and Lionel Madden), Investigating Victorian Journalism, Macmillan, 1990, 210.
• Associate Editor, Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism, Academia Press/British Library, 2009
• ‘The nineteenth-century media and Welsh identity’, in Laurel Brake, Bill Bell and David Finkelstein (eds), Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, Palgrave, 2000, 310-325.
• ‘The Welsh language and journalism’, in Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), The Welsh Language and its Social Domains 1801-1911. A Social History of the Welsh Language, University of Wales Press, 2000, 379-404
• (with William D. Jones) ‘The Welsh World and the British Empire, c.1851-1939: an exploration’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. xxx1, no.2, May 2003, 57-81. Also available in Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich (eds.), The British World. Diaspora, Culture, Identity, Frank Cass, 2003, 57-81.
• ‘Welsh Missionary Journalism in India, 1880-1947’ in Julie F. Codell (ed.), Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Madison, 2003, 242-272.
• Entries in the Banglapedia: the National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh (2003), and the New Dictionary of National Biography (2004).