About Christina
Dr Christina Faraday is a historian of art and ideas, with a special interest in how images and objects can communicate in powerful ways. She is a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius, University of Cambridge, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a trustee of the Walpole Society for British art history. She specialises in the art and architecture of Tudor England.
Growing up in Letchworth Garden City, she attended Highfield school, before going to St John's College, Cambridge to study History of Art. She graduated with a First, and was a recipient of the Larmor Award 'for students who excel both academically and in other aspects of life during their time in Cambridge'. She stayed at Cambridge to complete an MPhil and a PhD.
In 2019, Christina was chosen as one of ten 'AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinkers', a scheme which gives early career academics the chance to share their work with wider audiences. She is represented by the literary agency Georgina Capel Associates.
Her first book, Tudor Liveliness: Vivid Art in Post-Reformation England was published in April 2023 by the Paul Mellon Centre / Yale University Press. It was based on her AHRC-funded PhD on vividness in English art in the sixteenth century. Her MPhil research explored the symbolism of clocks and watches in Tudor portraits, and has been published in Renaissance Studies.
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Alongside her PhD, with support from the AHRC, she worked for two years part-time as a Curatorial Intern at the National Portrait Gallery, London, on the exhibition 'Elizabethan Treasures: Miniatures by Hilliard and Oliver' (21st February - 19th May 2019). She has previous experience at the V&A in London.
At Cambridge she lectures, supervises and assesses undergraduates in the History of Art Department and the History Faculty and runs courses as a tutor for the Institute for Continuing Education at Madingley Hall. She is a Co-Director for the MSt in History of Art and Visual Culture at ICE.
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She contributes regularly to popular media outlets including BBC Radio 3, Apollo Magazine. In 2021, an article she wrote for The Telegraph was nominated for a British Journalism Award in the Arts and Entertainment Category.
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In her spare time, Christina plays the violin and viola, and loves string chamber music. She makes art, particularly pottery and embroidery, and writes ghost stories. When in search of inspiration, she goes for walks to look at nature and architecture.