Patricia Skinner (historian)  Patricia E. Skinner, FRHistS (born 1965) is a British historian and academic, specialising in Medieval Europe. She is currently Professor of History at Swansea University. She was previously Reader in Medieval History at the University of Winchester and Lecturer in Humanities at the University of Southampton. She has published extensively on the social history of southern Italy and health and medicine. With Emily Cook, she started the project "Effaced from History: Facial Difference and its Impact from Antiquity to the Present Day" to study the history of facial disfigurement. Skinner received her PhD in Medieval History from the University of Birmingham in 1990. Her thesis on the Duchy of Gaeta was published in 1995 as "Family Power in Southern Italy". In 1997, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS). She has been co-editor of "Social History of Medicine" since 2014, and a member of the council of the Royal Historical Society since 2015.