Professor Ludmilla Jordanova

• Cultural history in Early Modern and Modern Europe
• Portraiture and identity in Britain from the seventeenth century to the present day
• History of science and medicine

 
Key words: England | Europe | Early Modern | Modern | Cultural History | Women, gender and sexuality | History of Medicine | Historiography | History of Science

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.

Ludmilla Jordanova would particularly welcome applications from research students interested in working on:

• any aspect of portraiture
• topics in the history of science and medicine since 1660
• cultural history, gender history, and historiography, especially the roles of visual and material culture in historical argument
• heroism, the representation of achievement and occupational cultures from the seventeenth century onwards
• critical approaches to public history
• topics in the medical humanities
• topics that involve the use of visual and material evidence and/or the study of museums and galleries
• topics that lie at points of intersection between art history and history

Professor Jordanova teaches on both the MA in Early Modern History and the MA in Modern History, offering modules on People, Portraits and Things 1660-1800 and The Construction of Modern Heroism 1725-1930. She also teaches on the undergraduate paper Power, Culture and Belief in Europe 1500-1800.

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. Ludmilla is a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery.