Lisa Jardine: Cancer Can't Slow Her Down
No one could accuse Lisa Jardine of being slow to get to the point. Barely has she parked herself on the sofa of her Bloomsbury apartment than she announces, "You know I had breast cancer and was out for most of last year." No calls for sympathy, no easing gently into the subject; just cards on the table from the off.
Even so, you should be careful about taking Jardine at face value. After surgery, followed by gruelling courses of radio and chemotherapy, out for most people means out. With Jardine it's not that simple. She says that her year of cancer treatment gave her the time and space to reassess her priorities, but, when you press her, it's hard to see what impact it did have on her working life. She didn't stop either her teaching, or her research. "Queen Mary (the University of London college where she works) was wonderful to me."
So what did change? She thinks for a while. "I suppose I have got better at saying no to things I don't want to do, more quickly."
Her official titles are centenary professor of renaissance studies at Queen Mary and director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters - also at Queen Mary - but these scarcely do her justice. Her writing and research credits are four times longer than even most successful academics; she speaks French, Italian, Dutch, Modern Greek, Ancient Greek, Latin and some Hebrew; and - a piece de resistance for a history and English scholar - she's picked up the Royal Society medal for popularising science and is on the governing body of the Royal Institution.
Where some academics might have used a serious illness to reflect on a career well done, her initial response was of disappointment. "Faced with losing everything, you can't help but look back on your life so far," she says. "And my feeling was that I hadn't done enough. I want to do more, much more, and my resolution at the start of the current academic year was to work faster.
"What I really want is to produce a research book, such as Simon Schama's Embarrassment of Riches or Jung Chang's Wild Swans, that stops the informed reading public in its tracks. My books on Erasmus and Wren did grab their attention, but I still don't feel that I've managed to write about the ideas that matter to me in a way people can properly share with me."
Jardine hopes she will achieve this with her next major book, on Anglo-Dutch relations, which will be published in roughly four years' time. "All my big, familiar themes are there," she says. "I'll try to show that the strands of history are woven so tightly together that there is no idea of nationhood, that there is no concept of the Orient as a mysterious other and that one cannot isolate faiths."
Even so, you should be careful about taking Jardine at face value. After surgery, followed by gruelling courses of radio and chemotherapy, out for most people means out. With Jardine it's not that simple. She says that her year of cancer treatment gave her the time and space to reassess her priorities, but, when you press her, it's hard to see what impact it did have on her working life. She didn't stop either her teaching, or her research. "Queen Mary (the University of London college where she works) was wonderful to me."
So what did change? She thinks for a while. "I suppose I have got better at saying no to things I don't want to do, more quickly."
Her official titles are centenary professor of renaissance studies at Queen Mary and director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters - also at Queen Mary - but these scarcely do her justice. Her writing and research credits are four times longer than even most successful academics; she speaks French, Italian, Dutch, Modern Greek, Ancient Greek, Latin and some Hebrew; and - a piece de resistance for a history and English scholar - she's picked up the Royal Society medal for popularising science and is on the governing body of the Royal Institution.
Where some academics might have used a serious illness to reflect on a career well done, her initial response was of disappointment. "Faced with losing everything, you can't help but look back on your life so far," she says. "And my feeling was that I hadn't done enough. I want to do more, much more, and my resolution at the start of the current academic year was to work faster.
"What I really want is to produce a research book, such as Simon Schama's Embarrassment of Riches or Jung Chang's Wild Swans, that stops the informed reading public in its tracks. My books on Erasmus and Wren did grab their attention, but I still don't feel that I've managed to write about the ideas that matter to me in a way people can properly share with me."
Jardine hopes she will achieve this with her next major book, on Anglo-Dutch relations, which will be published in roughly four years' time. "All my big, familiar themes are there," she says. "I'll try to show that the strands of history are woven so tightly together that there is no idea of nationhood, that there is no concept of the Orient as a mysterious other and that one cannot isolate faiths."