Dr Suzanna Ivanic

Dr Suzanna Ivanic joined Kent in 2017. She gained her BA from the University of Cambridge in 2007 and went on to work for international classical musicians in artist management. After four years, she returned to postgraduate study at the University of Cambridge, completing her PhD in 2015. During this time, she co-founded the Cambridge New Habsburg Studies Network and became a Seminar Fellow at the Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota. She went on to win a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Royal Holloway, University of London, and to take up a lecturing post at the University of Cambridge prior to joining Kent.     

In 2021-2023, she was Principal Investigator on an AHRC-funded research network, ‘The Connected World of Central Europe, 1500-1700’, examining connections across and beyond Central Europe through objects. With Dr Tomasz Grusiecki, she is in the process of editing a special issue resulting from the project, ‘Connected Central European Worlds: Material Entanglements, 1500-1700’. She is developing an AHRC Impact Award-funded Renaissance Prague Stories app with colleagues Dr Markéta Ježková, Dr Anna Parker and Martin Meduna (Grypha), enabling visitors to the city to follow historical characters through Prague’s streets to encounter its international past. Suzanna is Co-Editor in Chief of European History Quarterly and also serves on the editorial board of the Performing the Past: How Objects Shape Communal Identity book series published by Brepols. She was a panel member of the European Research Council Advanced Grant in 2023 and regularly reviews for journals and international funding bodies.

Dr Suzanna Ivanic is the Director of the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. In this role since 2023, she leads the research centre’s seminar series, external partnerships, and the MEMS MA and PhD programmes. She has also instituted ‘MEMS Labs’, which are intensive working research groups for postgraduate students and staff centred on methodologies and approaches.

Focusing on Central and Eastern Europe, Suzanna’s broad research interests span religion, material and visual culture, and travel. She has published on amulets, religious objects, and religion in the domestic sphere, and articles on a pilgrimage travelogue. Her monograph Cosmos and Materiality in Early Modern Prague is published by Oxford University Press (2021) and won the Society for Renaissance Studies Biennial Book Prize in 2022 and Honourable Mention in the BASEES Women’s Forum book prize 2023. Suzanna's trade book Catholica: The Visual Culture of Catholicism, a research-informed publication for designers, art junkies and the general public was published with Thames & Hudson in 2022 and has been translated into Dutch, French, Italian and Japanese. 

Suzanna teaches modules on early modern Europe, with a particular focus on cultural and social history, working with museums and material approaches. 

Suzanna is happy to talk with MA and PhD candidates considering topics relating to early modern European history, especially those interested in religious history, Central and Eastern Europe, taking cultural and social perspectives, and using material and visual approaches.

Current and recent PhD supervision includes:

• Anisia Iacob, ‘Crafting the Reformation: Artisanal knowledge, material culture, and religious practice in early modern Europe’ (Leverhulme, Knowledge Orders before Modernity Scholarship) 

• Anna-Marie Pípalová, 'Historical Scholarship and the Re-Creation of Bohemian Identity, c.1650-1690' (AHRC Scholarship).

• Francesca Richards, 'Medicine, Charm or Treasure? Mediterranean Red Coral in England c.1600-1750' (Wellcome Trust Doctoral Scholarship).