Christina Faraday

Dr Christina Faraday is a historian of art and ideas, with a special interest in Tudor and Stuart Britain and the wider 16th and 17th-century world. She is a Research Fellow in History of Art at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and a BBC New Generation Thinker. In 2022 she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Her first book, Tudor Liveliness: Vivid Art in Post-Reformation England was published by the Paul Mellon Centre and Yale University Press in April 2023. This was based on her PhD research (University of Cambridge, 2019) and explored the idea of ‘liveliness’ or vividness in the art and culture of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Alongside her PhD she worked part-time as a Curatorial Intern at the National Portrait Gallery, London, on the exhibition ‘Elizabethan Treasures: Miniatures by Hilliard and Oliver’ (2019). She previously graduated with a First Class BA in History of Art and Architecture at St John’s College, Cambridge, and an MPhil in History of Art with Distinction, her research focusing on the symbolism of clocks and watches in Tudor portraits. Her academic work has been published in leading scholarly journals, including Renaissance Studies, British Art Studies and Print Quarterly.

Christina contributes regularly to popular media, including BBC Radio 3 and Apollo Magazine. In 2021 she was shortlisted for the British Journalism Awards in the Arts and Entertainment category. She has appeared on podcasts including Not Just The Tudors, Talking Tudors and the Evening Standard’s The Leader, and has presented a series of London history podcasts for PlaceCloud on Spotify. Christina teaches for the History of Art Department and History Faculty at Cambridge, and The Wallace Collection in London. She’s also a Tutor for the Institute for Continuing Education at Cambridge, where she co-directs the MSt in History of Art and Visual Culture.