Dr Christina Faraday
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cjfaraday.bsky.social
Dr Christina Faraday
@cjfaraday.bsky.social
4.5K followers 840 following 400 posts
Historian of art & ideas, University of Cambridge | FSA FRHistS | BBC New Generation Thinker | host of British Art Matters podcast | trustee of The Walpole Society | 📕 The Story of Tudor Art out now! | 🥦👻🎻 views own
https://www.christinajfaraday.com/
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Dr Christina Faraday @cjfaraday.bsky.social · Aug 19
My new book 📕 The Story of Tudor Art 🌹 comes out on 25th September. It’s the first book ever (!!) to look at art from across the whole sixteenth century in England and I can’t wait to share it with you.
Red book cover with gold lettering, titled The Story of Tudor Art. Instead of O’s, two portrait miniatures with Elizabeth I and the artist Nicholas Hilliard. In white at the bottom the words “A history of Tudor England through its art and objects”
Reposted by Dr Christina Faraday
pollyrowena.bsky.social
Haunting festive presence.
Tabby cat outside window looking in from dark in front of lit dinner candle indoors, so candle lights up his face like a ghost child
December 27, 2025 at 11:30 PM
Reposted by Dr Christina Faraday
jessemlocker.bsky.social
Things I found on my laptop, an occasional series

[Ad Reinhardt, How to Look at Modern Art in America (detail), 1946]
A cartoon of a man in a suit pointing and laughing at an abstract painting with the caption НА НА WHAT DOES THIS REPRESENT? In the next panel, the painting angrily points back at the shocked man with the caption WHAT DO YOU REPRESENT?
September 10, 2025 at 3:32 AM
Reposted by Dr Christina Faraday
bethgg.bsky.social
@cjfaraday.bsky.social Father Christmas came through! I LOVE it. I'm only on chapter 3 because there were niblings to entertain, but I've already earmarked 'Quentin Poulet' as an excellent name for a rabbit and started a list of new places we need to visit so I can do peering 😎
Red front cover of book - Christina J. Faraday. The Story of Tudor Art: a history of Tudor England through its art and objects.
December 27, 2025 at 6:04 PM
Reposted by Dr Christina Faraday
adamwithbooks.bsky.social
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...
Adam Smyth | Like No One in Existence
In September, I invited people to record themselves reading a short passage from an English translation of Rousseau’s...
www.lrb.co.uk
December 24, 2025 at 9:20 AM
Reposted by Dr Christina Faraday
apollo-magazine.com
‘Ask any curator, particularly if they work in an old building, and they often have strange stories to tell.’ And none more than M.R. James who drew deeply on his work as a medievalist and as director of the Fitzwilliam Museum for his ghostly tales, writes @cjfaraday.bsky.social
The ghostly world of M.R. James
Best known for his horrifying tales of the supernatural, the author was inspired by his work as a medievalist and the spookiness of antique objects, writes Christina J. Faraday
buff.ly
December 21, 2025 at 7:30 AM
cjfaraday.bsky.social
I had so much fun thinking about M. R. James, ghosts, art and objects for Apollo this month 👻👻👻
apollo-magazine.com Apollo @apollo-magazine.com · 8d
‘There is something about art history and archaeology that makes previous ages seem especially immediate. No wonder so many scholars of those disciplines have turned to writing ghost stories – chief among them M.R. James.’ @cjfaraday.bsky.social reads his tales with an antiquarian eye
The ghostly world of M.R. James
Best known for his horrifying tales of the supernatural, the author was inspired by his work as a medievalist and the spookiness of antique objects, writes Christina J. Faraday
buff.ly
December 20, 2025 at 10:08 AM
Reposted by Dr Christina Faraday
apollo-magazine.com
‘There is something about art history and archaeology that makes previous ages seem especially immediate. No wonder so many scholars of those disciplines have turned to writing ghost stories – chief among them M.R. James.’ @cjfaraday.bsky.social reads his tales with an antiquarian eye
The ghostly world of M.R. James
Best known for his horrifying tales of the supernatural, the author was inspired by his work as a medievalist and the spookiness of antique objects, writes Christina J. Faraday
buff.ly
December 20, 2025 at 8:00 AM
Reposted by Dr Christina Faraday
oldfortunatus.bsky.social
Just catching up with @cjfaraday.bsky.social ‘s brilliant Story of Tudor Art.
Highly recommended. www.hive.co.uk/Product/Chri...
www.hive.co.uk
December 19, 2025 at 1:50 PM
cjfaraday.bsky.social
My little piece 'Accuracy, Astrology, and Authority' appears in the One Object segment of British Art Studies 29, where 8 of us consider the Ramsay-Kerr watch from different angles. I looked at its maker's curious philosophical proclivities, & other things...: britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/29/de...
British Art Studies
*British Art Studies* is an innovative space for new peer-reviewed scholarship on all aspects of British art.
britishartstudies.ac.uk
December 19, 2025 at 1:27 PM
cjfaraday.bsky.social
I spoke to @onthetudortrail.bsky.social about The Story of Tudor Art for Talking Tudors podcast! Listen as I bust Tudor rose myths and get a bit too enthusiastic about women ropemakers, on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf8t...
Episode 326 - The Story of Tudor Art with Dr Christina Faraday
YouTube video by Talking Tudors
www.youtube.com
December 19, 2025 at 1:05 PM
Reposted by Dr Christina Faraday
earlymodernjohn.bsky.social
Belatedly caught up with @cjfaraday.bsky.social's great Radio 3 documentary on music in the glorious biographical portrait of Sir Henry Unton. It's my favourite early modern painting and Christina and guests bring it wonderfully to life. Ideal pre-Christmas listening! www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...
BBC Radio 3 - Sunday Feature, Sir Henry Unton's Music
Christina Faraday looks at possibly the first image of amateur music playing in England.
www.bbc.co.uk
December 19, 2025 at 11:13 AM
Reposted by Dr Christina Faraday
tonyriches.bsky.social
Talking Tudors: Natalie Grueninger speaks with Dr Christina Faraday about her new book, 'The Story of Tudor Art', a first-of-its-kind survey of 16th-century English art. talkingtudors.podbean.com/e/the-story-... @cjfaraday.bsky.social @onthetudortrail.bsky.social #Tudors #Podcast
December 17, 2025 at 8:49 PM
cjfaraday.bsky.social
THE STORY OF TUDOR ART - came out in September. The first book on English art across the whole 16th century, for the royal court and beyond it. Extremely Christmassy - a great gift - doesn’t even need wrapping because the dust jacket is red and shiny gold. 🌟🌹👑♥️
December 7, 2025 at 6:12 PM
Reposted by Dr Christina Faraday
hltn.bsky.social
Help me, #skystorians of #elizabethan England & #earlymodern material culture enjoyers… This is Isaac Oliver's splendidly unsubtle - and surprisingly tiny - Party in the Open Air (Statens Museum Kunst, C'hagen). Q: what's the bottle (decanter?) in the foreground of the 24hr party people side? 🗃️
December 3, 2025 at 2:36 PM
Reposted by Dr Christina Faraday
prum.bsky.social
I hope someone draws this wonderful story about Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and the power of the arts to help us see things differently, to the attention of our Education Secretary. Do read it, it will lift your spirits.
December 2, 2025 at 10:59 AM
cjfaraday.bsky.social
A bit of a departure for me in @apollo-magazine.com’s December issue, where I look at what M. R. James's ghost stories can tell us about the pleasing terror of studying art and objects...
A photo of the cover of the December 2025 Apollo Magazine with a close up of a painting by Lippi of Joseph with grey hair and a halo, leaning on a staff, caption in white on his blue cloak reading “Getting Lippi in Rome” with a sub caption “the ghostly world of M R James” Double page spread of Apollo “Raising the Dead” in gothic writing against a sepia photo of the entrance to the Fitzwilliam Museum in the late 19th century when M. R. James was director, against a patterned red tablecloth. A photo of the end of the article reading: “Baxter was only too literal in his desire to “look through dead man's eyes” filling the binoculars with liquid made from boiled bones. But the dead, who 'didn't like having their bones boiled, finally come to carry Baxter off 'whither he would not'. An unfortunate end for Baxter, but what greater fantasy for students of the past than seeing history first-hand? Historians of all kinds - but especially art historians - devote their lives, by different means, to exactly this cause. What else is Michael Baxandall's famous concept of the 'period eye' - his attempt to recover the culturally shaped modes of vision specific to certain times and places - than a more respectable attempt to look through dead men's eyes? James was writing at a time when professional historians were anxious to distance their quasi-scientific approaches from the whimsical studies of antiquaries. But his stories reveal that he understood only too well what many students of art and history feel when faced with the remains of the past. The creeping feeling that we are never quite alone with the objects we study, that we are always somehow accompanied by the people who once made, viewed and used them, and that their intentions and desires are still deeply embedded in the objects that survive them. Drawing out these intentions, accounting for the humanity of the long dead, is a task that can cause the scholar considerable anxiety - accompanied or not by the fear that, should we get it wrong, the dead will find a way to return, to put us right.” Christina J. Faraday is an affiliated lecturer in history of art at the University of Cambridge and author of The Story of Tudor Art (Head of Zeus).
November 25, 2025 at 11:41 AM
Reposted by Dr Christina Faraday
drfrancisyoung.bsky.social
Just got this from @blpublishing.bsky.social by @tanyakirk.bsky.social! 📚👻 shop.bl.uk/products/the...
November 21, 2025 at 2:13 PM
Reposted by Dr Christina Faraday
cjfaraday.bsky.social
Perfect Hallowe'en-e'en post - my author copies of The Haunted Library, @blpublishing.bsky.social's latest Tales of the Weird volume, out on 13th November. My story 'The Advent Visitor' appears alongside some true classics of the genre...
Two copies of The Haunted Library on a table with richly patterned table cloths in red and white. The book cover is green and black, with a figure holding a candle looking up at a domed library. The Haunted Library book open at the contents page: The Devil's Manuscript S. LEVETT-YEATS The Tractate Middoth M. R. JAMES The Whisperers ALGERNON BLACKWOOD Fingers of a Hand H. D. EVERETT Mr. Tallent's Ghost MARY WEBB The Book MARGARET IRWIN The Library HESTER HOLLAND Midnight Express ALFRED NOYES Herodes Redivivus A. N. L. MUNBY W. S. L. P. HARTLEY What Shadows We Pursue RUSSELL KIRK The Work of Evil WILLIAM CROFT DICKINSON Revenant as Typewriter PENELOPE LIVELY The Advent Visitor C. J. FARADAY
October 30, 2025 at 11:29 AM
cjfaraday.bsky.social
Kevin the Carrot engaged to Katie? Gonna be a lot of broken heartichokes out there now one of the country’s most eligible batubers is off the table….
November 11, 2025 at 11:30 AM
Reposted by Dr Christina Faraday
johnnymains.co.uk
cc: @blpublishing.bsky.social

TALES OF THE WEIRD SUBSCRIPTION: shop.bl.uk/products/tal...
Tales of the Weird Subscription – A Weird Read, Every Month
Subscribe to Tales of the Weird – a British Library series of gothic, ghostly, and uncanny classics delivered to your door for year-round eerie enjoyment.
shop.bl.uk
November 11, 2025 at 10:04 AM
Reposted by Dr Christina Faraday
starcrossed2018.bsky.social
Somewhat astonishingly, here it is, a book, a thing in the world... More, including acknowledgements, soon❤️
The cover of a book. Text reads TEXTILE SHAKESPEARE. The illustration is of black and white embroidery of flowers, fruit, and animals; it's sitting on a blue and white William Morris print cushion. The table of contents of a book. The chapter titles read Stuff, Linen, Leather/Wool, Silk, Inky Cloak, Sew, Cut, Fold, Ruff.
October 31, 2025 at 2:27 PM
Reposted by Dr Christina Faraday
dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social
Finally nailed the promotional photo for my East Anglian remake of Don't Look Now, which tells the same story, but using all the locations from Whistle And I'll Come To You.
A photo I took of my friend Rosie walking along the beach at Covehithe, Suffolk
November 8, 2025 at 7:40 AM
Reposted by Dr Christina Faraday
bryonycoombs.bsky.social
I had a great time recently chatting with @cjfaraday.bsky.social about 'Visual Arts and the Auld Alliance' for the 'British Art Matters' Podcast. I am in the company of some wonderful authors discussing their (and others) works:
www.walpolesociety.org.uk/podcast
Podcast | The Walpole Society
www.walpolesociety.org.uk
November 7, 2025 at 1:28 PM
cjfaraday.bsky.social
I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek of this book! A marvellous new biography of The Notorious LMB.
November 6, 2025 at 2:58 PM
cjfaraday.bsky.social
On BBC Radio 3 in half an hour!
cjfaraday.bsky.social Dr Christina Faraday @cjfaraday.bsky.social · Oct 31
My episode of @bbcradio3bot.bsky.social Sunday Feature goes out this Sunday at 7:45pm (or catch up later on BBC Sounds). All about the musical aspects of my favourite Tudor picture, The Henry Unton Memorial Portrait at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Screenshot of the Sunday Feature webpage on the BBC website, listing the episode information. A detail of the Unton Memorial Portrait showing his house. Unton is hosting a dinner party with musicians in a broken consort, with wind and string instruments, and in an upstairs room plays the viola da gamba in a small group, music books on the table.
November 2, 2025 at 7:09 PM