# Natalia Nowakowska

Natalia Magdalena Nowakowska (born 1977) is an English historian of late medieval and Renaissance Europe with a particular interest in the Kingdom of Poland. She is Professor of European History at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in History at Somerville College.

## Academic career

Nowakowska grew up in the Polish diaspora community which formed in London after the Second World War. She read History at Lincoln College, Oxford, matriculating in 1995. After graduating she briefly worked in social policy research before returning to Lincoln College to work on her doctorate on the life and career of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon, which she completed in 2003. Her doctoral supervisor was Nicholas Davidson.
Nowakowska then took up a one-year Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at King's College London before joining University College, Oxford as a Junior Research Fellow in October 2005. In 2006 she was elected to a Tutorial Fellowship in History at Somerville College. In October 2019 Nowakowska was awarded the Title of Distinction of Professor of European History by the University of Oxford. She has previously served on the governing board of the university's Faculty of History.

### Research

Nowakowska's first monograph, based on her doctoral research, was published by Ashgate in 2007. For the book Nowakowska was named co-winner of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies' Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies alongside Geneviève Zubrzycki. A Polish translation of the book was published in 2011.
In 2012 Nowakowska was awarded a €1.4 million European Research Council Starting Grant to undertake an international project entitled "The Jagiellonians: Dynasty, Identity and Memory in Central Europe". She and her team of five postdoctoral researchers analysed the cultural memory of the Jagiellonian dynasty, producing a 2018 public exhibition at the Bodleian Library and a series of essays and monographs from this research. Nowakowska's edited collection, Remembering the Jagiellonians, was published by Routledge in 2018.
In 2018 Nowakowska's study of the early Reformation in Poland, King Sigismund of Poland and Martin Luther: The Reformation Before Confessionalization, was published by Oxford University Press. The book won a total of four prizes, including a second Kulczycki Book Prize and the Gerald Strauss Prize awarded by the Sixteenth Century Society for the best book published in the field of German Reformation history. Her research for the book was supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship.
Nowakowska is currently working on a new global history of the Jagiellonian dynasty.

### Media work

Nowakowska has contributed to two blogs related to the discipline of history: one, Somerville Historian, explores teaching and writing history at the University of Oxford and was begun in 2010; the other, History Monograph, documented Nowakowska's process of researching and writing a history book during the year of her British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2012-13).
In 2022 Nowakowska appeared as an interviewee in the BBC Radio 4 series The Invention of Poland hosted by Misha Glenny. In 2024 she was interviewed for another Radio 4 serial, The Reinvention of Poland, hosted by Anne McElvoy. She has also appeared as a guest in podcasts by the Historical Association and BBC History exploring the history of late medieval and early modern Poland and Lithuania and the role of the Jagiellonians in shaping central Europe during these periods.

## Personal life

Nowakowska is married to Nick Kerigan.