Natalia Nowakowska is Professor of European History at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Somerville College. She is a historian of late medieval and Renaissance Europe, with a particular interest in the kingdom of Poland and its many neighbours.

Her study of the early Reformation in Poland, King Sigismund of Poland and Martin Luther: the Reformation before Confessionalization (OUP, 2018) won multiple book prizes. She has written an award-winning study of a late medieval royal cardinal – Church, State and Dynasty in Renaissance Poland: the Career of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon (2007; Polish translation 2011) – and edited a ground-breaking book, Remembering the Jagiellonians (Routledge, 2019). From 2013 to 2018 she led a major international research project on the Jagiellonians, one of the most powerful ruling families of Renaissance Europe, and one of the least well-known. Natalia has recorded a number of podcasts and interviews on Polish and East European history for the BBC, BBC History Magazine and the Historical Association.

She is currently writing the first transnational history of the Jagiellonians (c.1377-1596) revealing how a royal house from pagan Lithuania became a leading European Catholic dynasty. Ruling territory stretching from Kyiv to Prague, and from the Baltic to the Adriatic, the book will set this dynasty’s remarkable story in its full European and Eurasian context for the first time.

Twitter: @OxHistorian