Dr Martha Vandrei

I am an historian of British cultural and intellectual history from about 1600. Much of my work has investigated how people understood and related to the past through scholarship, antiquarianism, drama, poetry, art, and architecture. This was the focus of my first book, Queen Boudica and Historical Culture in Britain: An Image of Truth, which was published by Oxford University Press/Past and Present in summer 2018.

My new book, which explores currents of unreason in Britain's Age of Enlightenment is under contract with Yale University Press for publication in 2029. This will be the first of two books on that rather enormous theme, the second exploring the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

My interests are strongly interdisciplinary, emphasising the links between history, literature, philosophy, and "the science of mind". As such, I am also pursuing research into Britain's Literary and Philosophical Societies, specifically in the southwest, and using this material to explore the social foundations of modern knowledge culture.

Biography:

I received my first degree en absentia from the State University of New York while studying abroad at Oxford of all places. I went on to complete an MA in Modern History at King's College London and, to the astonishment of my high school history teachers who rarely saw me outside of detention, went on to complete my PhD in 2013, also at KCL, under the supervision of Professor Ludmilla Jordanova. Following appointments as a research assistant at the University of York and on various media projects with the BBC and others, I was appointed to Lecturer at the University of Exeter in 2015. I divide my time between Cornwall and London and love both equally but for different reasons.

Research supervision:

I am interested in supervising research projects that engage with the history of historiography and historical culture, and any historical subjects with interdisciplinary reach. I would be very open to discussing proposals from students interested in the history of ideas in Britain more broadly, especially regarding intellectual and cultural discourses of knowledge, belief, and reason.