John Vincent Beckett FSA FRHistS (born 1950) is an English local historian who has been Professor of English Regional History at the University of Nottingham since 1990.
He completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Lancaster in 1971, which awarded him a Doctor of Philosophy degree four years later for his thesis Land Ownership in Cumbria, c. 1680–c.
[1][2] From 1974 to 1976, Beckett was the Lord Adams Research Fellow at Newcastle University; he then spent two years lecturing at Fairleigh Dickinson University's Banbury-based Wroxton College, and then lectured at the University of Hull for a short period before taking up a lectureship at the University of Nottingham in 1979.
[1][3] Becket is a historian of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
He is a local historian, and has studied topics relating to village life, Parliamentary enclosure and local politics, agricultural history, church history, and the history of landed estates and their owners.