A native of Filer, Idaho, Norman Jones began his higher education at the College of Southern Idaho, earned a bachelor's degree at Idaho State University, and went on to complete his master's degree at the University of Colorado, Boulder. For his doctoral work he switched locations entirely, earning his degree at Cambridge University in England in 1978. Later that year he joined the faculty at USU. He quickly worked through the ranks from assistant to associate to full professor, and has served as head of the Department of History since 1994. Dr. Jones has published approximately forty-one scholarly articles and ten books including The Elizabethan World (2010) and The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation (2001), The Birth of the Elizabethan Age (1993), God and the Moneylenders (1989), and the prize-winning Faith by Statute (1982). The Huntington Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Geneva in Switzerland, and Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard Universities have awarded him grants and fellowships. In 2008-2009 he was a visiting Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University.