Dr Christina Faraday

Christina Faraday, FSA FRHistS, specialises in Tudor and Stuart visual and material culture, with wider interests in the art of Northern Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Her latest book, The Story of Tudor Art (2025), is the first ever to take a comprehensive look at art from across the whole sixteenth century in England.

Her first book, Tudor Liveliness: Vivid Art in Post Reformation England, was published by the Paul Mellon Centre/Yale University Press in 2023. Based on her AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Cambridge, it uses the period’s concept of vividness in texts and rhetorical theory to explore Elizabethan and Jacobean attitudes towards the roles of images. It shows that Tudor and Jacobean images and objects were often seen as vivid and ‘realistic’, even if they don’t appear to conform to modern expectations of realistic images.

She teaches for the History of Art Department and the History Faculty, and has taught for papers on Tudor Visual Culture; Part IIA Approaches to the History of Art; Part I Objects, Meaning of Art and Part I Meaning of Architecture. She is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA). She also contributes to the Department’s access and outreach programmes, including the annual Sutton Trust Summer School, and is a Tutor for Professional And Continuing Education at Madingley Hall, where she is Co-Director of the MSt in History of Art and Visual Culture.

In 2026, she will be curating Tudor Contemporary at the Heong Gallery, Downing College, Cambridge. She previously worked as a Curatorial Intern at the National Portrait Gallery, London on the exhibition 'Elizabethan Treasures: Miniatures by Hilliard and Oliver' (2019). She previously graduated from St John’s College, Cambridge with a First Class BA in History of Art and stayed to complete the MPhil in History of Art and Architecture with Distinction. Her MPhil thesis researched the symbolism of clocks and dials in the material and visual culture of Tudor England, and was part-funded by the George Daniels Educational Trust.