Lisa Jardine

Lisa Jardine
Jardine in 2015, portrait from the Royal Society
Born	Lisa Anne Bronowski (1944-04-12)12 April 1944 Oxford, England
Died	25 October 2015(2015-10-25) (aged 71)
Cause of death	Cancer
Nationality	British
Alma mater	University of Cambridge (BA, MA, PhD) University of Essex (MA)
Occupation	Historian
Employer	Queen Mary University of London University College London
Spouse(s)	Nick Jardine (m. 1969; dissolved 1979) John Robert Hare (m. 1982)
Children	2 sons, 1 daughter
Parent(s)	Jacob Bronowski Rita Coblentz
Awards	CBE (2005) PhD FRS (2015)
Website	www.livesandletters.ac.uk/people/lisa-jardine
Lisa Jardine's voice Recorded December 2008 from the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time

Lisa Anne Jardine, CBE FRSFRHistS (née Bronowski; 12 April 1944 – 25 October 2015) was a British historian of the early modern period. From 1990 to 2011, she was Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies and Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary University of London. From 2008 to January 2014 she was Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA).

Jardine was a Member of Council of the Royal Institution, until 2009. On 1 September 2012, she relocated with her research centre and staff to University College London (UCL) to become founding director of its Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities.

Jardine was born on 12 April 1944 in Oxford, the eldest of four daughters of mathematician and polymath Jacob Bronowski and the sculptor Rita Coblentz. Bronowski, who died in 1974 and had been famous for his 13-part television series, "The Ascent of Man" (1973), was the subject of Jardine's Conway Memorial Lecture, "Things I Never Knew About My Father", delivered at the Conway Hall Ethical Society on 26 June 2014.

An avid reader with an interest in history from a very young age, Jardine won a mathematics scholarship to Cheltenham Ladies' College and later attended Newnham College, Cambridge, and the University of Essex. For two years she took the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos before, in her final year and under the influence of Raymond Williams, she read English. Fluent in eight languages (including Greek and Latin), she studied for an MA in the Literary Theory of Translation with Professor Donald Davie at the University of Essex. She was awarded a PhD from the University of Cambridge with a dissertation on Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (subsequently published by Cambridge University Press).