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Dr Christina J Faraday provides an update on her sabbatical at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art

At the end of March I started a six-month Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art in London, taking a sabbatical from my Research Fellowship at 91Ö±²¥. The PMC is the foremost centre for the study of British art in the country, and supports scholars working in this area at a range of career stages. I was originally meant to take up this scholarship in the midst of the pandemic, but the PMC kindly allowed me to defer it to this year so I could make the most of being able to go into the Centre in person, using their resources and meeting like-minded scholars in my field.

The PMC itself occupies a terrace in London’s beautiful Bedford Square. The study room and facilities are second to none in my field, while a changing series of exhibitions and seminars means there’s always something to look at or attend. I’m enjoying broadening my scholarly horizons and being in London, having spent most of my career to date in Cambridge! I’m especially excited to be working at the Paul Mellon Centre as they will be publishing my first book with Yale University Press, next spring: Tudor Liveliness: Vivid Art in Post-Reformation England.

My project for the duration of the fellowship is to write a new Story of Tudor Art, aimed at a general audience. There is currently no book that looks at the full range of visual art across the whole Tudor century, encompassing a variety of genres and materials. I hope to fix that, revealing the wonderfully rich visual world that Tudors experienced.