Dr Suzanna Ivanic

Suzanna Ivanic joined Kent in September 2017 as Lecturer in Early Modern European History. 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.

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. 

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. In 2021-2023, she is 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. She is also on the Editorial Board of the Performing the Past: How Objects Shape Communal Identity book series published by Brepols.

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

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 PhD supervision includes:

• Francesca Richards, 'Medicine, Charm or Treasure? Mediterranean Red Coral in England c.1600-1750' (Wellcome Trust Doctoral Scholarship).
• Anna-Marie Pípalová, 'Historical Scholarship and the Re-Creation of Bohemian Identity, c.1650-1690' (AHRC Scholarship).
• Lucy Deakin, 'Witchcraft, Neighbours and Families in Early Modern Essex'.