Professor Ludmilla Jordanova
Chair in Modern History
Tel +44 (0)20 7848 1277
Email ludmilla.jordanova@kcl.ac.uk
Address Department of History
King’s College London
Room K2.33
Strand
London WC2R 2LS
Biography
Ludmilla Jordanova joined the department in 2006 as Professor of Modern History. She has previously taught at the University of Essex, where she took an MA in the Department of Art History and Theory, as well as at the Universities of Oxford, York, East Anglia and Cambridge. Ludmilla read Natural Sciences at New Hall, Cambridge but fell in love with the history and philosophy of science, staying on to do her doctorate on French science of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Research interests
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Cultural history in Early Modern and Modern Europe
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Portraiture and identity in Britain from the seventeenth century to the present day
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History of science and medicine
Ludmilla Jordanova has written widely about the cultural history of science and medicine, on gender and the family and on visual and material culture. For the past decade she has been engaged with issues around portraiture and identity, which continues to the focus of her research and teaching. She is currently writing a book which explores the role of visual and material culture in historical practice, provisionally entitled The Look of the Past, and has co-directed an AHRC-funded project on Freethinking and Language Planning in Late Seventeenth Century England, along with William Poole of New College, Oxford, 2004-2007. Ludmilla is also interested in the ways in which the discipline of history is practised, its relationships with other disciplines, and the public role of ‘history’; topics that are explored in her book History in Practice (Arnold, 2000). A second, revised and expanded edition was published in 2006.
Selected publications
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Ludmilla Jordanova (2012) 'The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini.' AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW, 117 (1), pp. 294-295. [Book Review (Print)]
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Ludmilla Jordanova (2011) 'The English Virtuoso: Art, Medicine, and Antiquarianism in the Age of Empiricism' Medical History, 55 (1), pp. 124-126. [Book Review (Print)]
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Ludmilla Jordanova (2011) 'What's in a Name? Historians and Theory' English Historical Review, 126 (523), pp. 1456-1477.
[Review (research) (Print)]
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Ludmilla Jordanova (2010) 'Paul Sandby: history, observation and display' JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY, 36 (3), pp. 344-348. [Editorial Material (Print)]
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Ludmilla Jordanova (2010) 'Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio: A History of Mass Media Images and Popular Attitudes in America' Isis, 101 (4), pp. 896-897. [Book Review (Print)]
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Ludmilla Jordanova (2010) 'Public History and the Public Understanding of Medicine: the Case of Embryology' HISTORY WORKSHOP JOURNAL (70), pp. 217-221. [Article in print Journal]
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Ludmilla Jordanova (2009) 'Historical Judgement: The Limits of Historiographical Choice' English Historical Review, 124 (509), pp. 912-914.
[Book Review (Print)]
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Ludmilla Jordanova (2008) 'Image matters' HISTORICAL JOURNAL, 51 (3), pp. 777-791. [Review (research) (Print)]
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L Jordanova (2008) 'The philosophy of history: Talks given at the Institute of Historical Research, London, 2000-2006' English Historical Review, 123 (501), pp. 412-414. [Book Review (Print)]
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L Jordanova (2007) 'Madame Tussaud and the history of waxworks' EUROPEAN HISTORY QUARTERLY, 37 (1), pp. 169-170.
[Book Review (Print)]
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Ludmilla Jordanova (2006) History in Practice Hodder Arnold
[Authored Book in print]
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Ludmilla Jordanova, Mikulas Teich (2005) 'Angels writing on the shoulders of time?' Österreichischer Zeitung für Geschichtswischenschaft, pp. 11-26. [Article in print Journal]
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Ludmilla Jordanova (2005) 'How do cultural booms happen?', in Big Questions in History pp. 209-213 [Chapter]
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Ludmilla Jordanova (2005) 'The Body of the Artist', in Self-Portrait Renaissance to Contemporary pp. 42-55 [Chapter]
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Ludmilla Jordanova (2004) 'Material Models as Visual Culture', in Models the Third Dimension of Science pp. 443-451
[Chapter]
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Ludmilla Jordanova (2003) 'Portraits, People and Things: Richard Mead and Medical Identity' HISTORY OF SCIENCE, 41 (133), pp. 293-313. [Article in print Journal]
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Ludmilla Jordanova (2002) 'Gender', in History and Historians in the Twentieth Century pp. 120-140 [Chapter]
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Ludmilla Jordanova (2001) 'Richard Mead's Communities of Belief in Eighteenth Century London', in Christianity and Community in the West (essays in honour of John Bossy) pp. 241-259 [Chapter]
Teaching
Undergraduate
Postgraduate
Professor Jordanova also contributes to the MSc in Medical Humanities, and the MA programmes in Medicine and Literature and Eighteenth-Century Studies.
PhD supervision
Given that she is not far from retirement, Professor Jordanova is no longer accepting applications from research students.
Expertise and public engagement
Professor Ludmilla Jordanova was a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery (2001-2009) and she has recently joined the Wellcome Trust’s Medical History and Humanities Funding Committee.