Jenny Spinks joined the University of Melbourne in 2017 as Hansen Senior Lecturer in History. She teaches and researches the history of early modern Europe, with a particular focus on Germany, France, and the Low Countries.
Her teaching often utilises material culture and visual images, and she has a special interest in connecting students to historical resources in the community. Jenny currently researches early modern polemical print culture, religious conflicts, disasters and wonders, and the history of emotions. She is working on the ways that Protestants and Catholics across early modern northern Europe circulated, exchanged and reinvented reports of terrifying and extraordinary events like floods, earthquakes and cases of extreme cruelty. She has recently written several articles on sixteenth-century European anxieties about religious practices and supernatural beliefs in non-European settings, and she has new projects in development on print, material culture and identity in early modern Germany, with a focus on Nuremberg and the artist Albrecht Dürer. Jenny has particular expertise in the use of visual images as historical sources, and this is a feature of the way that her research connects with a broader public. Her community engagement activities include co-curated exhibitions on early modern apocalyptic and supernatural beliefs. Jenny’s previous positions include a permanent post in History at the University of Manchester (2012-2017), and prior to that several years as an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow (teaching and research) at the University of Melbourne. She has held research fellowships with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, the Warburg Institute in London, the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. She has also been awarded research funding by the Australian Research Council in Australia and the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK.
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FEATURED Journal article
Learning to Teach in the Field: Five Professors Tell How Running an Overseas Study Tour Improved Their Classroom Teaching
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Projects
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Internal Research Grant
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Scholarly Works
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Credentials
Positions
The Hansen Senior Lectureship In History
Historical And Philosophical Studies
Education
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
University of Melbourne
MASTERS OF ARTS
University of Tasmania
BACHELOR OF FINE ARTS (HONS)
University of Tasmania