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 the Past and Present book series and Oxford University Press in summer 2018.

In my work, I draw on a variety of source material, including biblical, classical, antiquarian and literary works, as well as theatre, song, imagery, and sculpture. My most recent interests are in the history of philosophy and intellectual history, especially in the development of the discipline of the history of ideas in Britain and America. I am using these frameworks to reconsider approaches to intellectual history, particularly in the nineteenth century.

My new book project explores how non-rational ideas influenced humanistic scholarship in the modern period, provisionally titled "Beyond Reason: The Irrational in Intellectual Life in Modern Britain". Or something like that.

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.

I am interested in supervising research projects that engage with the history of historiography and historical culture, as well as memory, commemoration, and the reception of the past. However, 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, disciplines, religion, and gender.