Nicholas J. Saunders was educated at the universities of Sheffield, Cambridge, and Southampton. He has held teaching and research positions at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the University of the West Indies, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington D.C., and at University College London, where he was Reader in Material Culture and undertook a major British Academy sponsored investigation into the material culture anthropology of the First World War. As of 2014 Saunders is Professor in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol,
