Dr Jackson Armstrong joined the School in September 2008. He teaches medieval and early modern history. He is interested in Scotland and England in the period 1300-1600, and especially in the ligatures of local societies (including ideas of kinship), relations with ‘centres’ of political power, and frameworks of law and related aspects of government. He is particularly curious about regions typically considered to be ‘peripheral’. He leads the Aberdeen Burgh Records Project, which investigates Aberdeen's late medieval civic archives, and much of his work to date has concerned the fifteenth-century Anglo-Scottish borderlands, and the themes of frontiers and conflict. His book, England's Northern Frontier (2020) was joint winner of the Whitfield Prize.

Dr Armstrong is co-founder of the Aberdeen Humanities Fund, created in 2012.

He is additionally interested in life writing and in 2004 edited and published, as Seven Eggs Today, the diaries of a nineteenth-century Canadian woman. He completed his undergraduate study at Queen's University at Kingston, and a MPhil in Medieval History and a PhD at the University of Cambridge. During his postgraduate research he held a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In 2007–8 he tutored at the universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews in European and Scottish history.