Lisa Jardine

Lisa Jardine CBE is Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, and Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London.

She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Honorary Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and Jesus College, Cambridge, and holds honorary doctorates from the University of St Andrews, Sheffield Hallam University and the Open University.

She is a trustee of the V&A Museum, Chair of the V&A Museum of Childhood Board of Trustees, and a member of the Council of the Royal Institution. For the academic year 2007–08 she is seconded to the Royal Society as Advisor to its Collections.

She writes and reviews for all the major UK national newspapers and magazines and for the Washington Post, and has presented and appears regularly on arts, history and current affairs programmes for TV and radio. She is a regular writer and presenter of A Point of View, on BBC Radio 4. She judged the 1996 Whitbread Prize, the 1999 Guardian First Book Award, the 2000 Orwell Prize and was Chair of Judges for the 1997 Orange Prize and the 2002 Man Booker Prize.

She is the author of a number of bestselling general books, including Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, and biographies of Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke. Lisa Jardine is married to the architect John Hare and has three children.