Dr Pickles researches the social and cultural analysis of religious belief and practices in the early middle ages (400-1200). His research is interdisciplinary, bringing together textual, material, and linguistic culture. His first book - Kingship, Society, and the Church in Anglo-Saxon Yorkshire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) - investigated the social and cultural processes of conversion to Christianity and church building in the early medieval kingdom of the Deirans (modern Yorkshire). He is currently engaged in researching and writing a local-global history of Whitby Abbey from its foundation in 657 to the present day. His UKRI AHRC funded project, Early Christian Churches and Landscapes (ECCLES), a collaboration with Professor Sally Foster (University of Stirling) and Dr Tomás Ó Carragáin (University College Cork), is creating a public web resource for churches across Britain and Ireland, to meet the needs of a range of strategic, educational and infrastructural stakeholders.