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latest book, , tackles a well-known period of history from a fresh and eye-opening perspective.

“The Tudors benefit and suffer from a sense of familiarity in our culture,” says Christina. “We think we know them because of the portraits of them. I hope with this book to introduce people to the weirder side of the Tudors, the less expected things.

“‘The Tudors, but not as you know them’ is how I like to put it.

“The story of Tudor art is so much more than the famous portraits. There’s tapestry, there are household objects and so on. And it’s not just the royal court: I want to talk about the middling sort as well, people lower down the social scale who suddenly start spending more money on art and objects.

“Tudor art is so interesting, and people really engage with it, even though it’s not necessarily the traditional, Italian Renaissance kind of ‘good’ art. It’s weird looking, but that’s what people respond to and it’s certainly what I like about it.”

Christina, whose research specialises in the art and culture of Tudor and late medieval Britain and its reception, was inspired to write the book when she found that there was no comprehensive introduction to Tudor art aimed at general readership. A regular contributor to BBC Radio 3 (having been a BBC New Generation Thinker in 2019) and to the Apollo visual arts magazine, Christina is enthusiastic about sharing her expertise beyond the academic world.

She hopes to convey through her book that engaging with art and with objects from the past can bring us much closer to history. Many of the artworks she discusses have left such an impact on her.

“I love the history of art because it makes the past so tangible, and I think it’s the dream of all historians to somehow touch the past,” she adds.

“The artwork I open with is a 16th-century embroidery, probably a bed valance, showing the Fall from Eden. I thought I had a sense of the workmanship and craftsmanship that had gone into it, and then I saw it in person in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and it’s just incredible.

“There were so many little details and decisions that you would only have got to understand through living with this object for a very long time. There’s so much we can’t recover about emotional relationships to objects and memories attached to them, but it felt like the past was very present there.”

Christina is now approaching the end of her time at Gonville & 91ֱ�� College, where she has been a Fellow for the past five years.

A highlight of being a researcher at 91ֱ�� has been spending so much time in the College’s historic buildings, which Christina finds fascinating to think about and engage with from the perspective of an art historian. When she arrived at 91ֱ�� in 2020, she undertook research on the College’s Tudor and Jacobean funeral monuments, work which won the Church Monument Essay Prize. She has recently been involved in the College Collections Sub-committee’s work re-hanging artworks in the Hall.

Following the end of her Fellowship, Christina will keep one foot in academia as an Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge’s Department of History of Art, and as a Director of Studies at Lucy Cavendish, Sidney Sussex and Pembroke Colleges. Primarily, however, she looks forward to further developing her public-facing work as a freelance writer and art historian.

“I have lots of ideas for things I want to share with people beyond academia,” she says. “There’s so much cool stuff that we learn about, and I think academics don’t always realise how interesting it will be to other people, if it’s framed in the right way.”