Professor Suzannah Lipscomb is an award-winning historian, author, and broadcaster.

Historian

Suzannah Lipscomb is Professor Emerita at the University of Roehampton, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries, and a columnist for History Today.

She received a double First, MSt, and DPhil in History from Lincoln and Balliol Colleges, Oxford. At Balliol, she held a Jowett Senior Scholarship.

Suzannah was formerly a Research Curator at Hampton Court Palace, and has won awards for her work in the heritage sector, including as Creative Director of the National Trust’s recent exhibition at Hardwick Hall, “We Are Bess.”

She has published articles in all the major newspapers and history magazines. In 2020, she was Chair of Judges of the Costa Book of the Year Award, and since 2020 has been a Trustee of the Mary Rose Trust.

She is a Senior Member at St Cross College, Oxford, and an Associate Member of the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford.

Author

Suzannah is the author of five books on the sixteenth century. She published her first book 1536: The Year that Changed Henry VIII in 2009 (Lion Hudson), followed by A Visitor's Companion in Tudor England (Ebury; 2012; Pegasus, 2013), The King is Dead: The Last Will and Testament of Henry VIII (Head of Zeus, 2015; Pegasus, 2016), and Witchcraft (Penguin Ladybird, 2018).

Her most recent book was The Voices of Nîmes: Women, Sex, and Marriage in Reformation Languedoc (Oxford University Press, 2019). The TLS described the book as 'captivating'. Literary Review called it 'a finely wrought and colourful mosaic', and History Today said it was 'proficient, passionate, and witty'. Professor Sir Simon Schama described it 'a beautiful book, grippingly written, and destined to be a classic of social history'. The Social History Society Book Prize awarded The Voices of Nîmes a Special Commendation.

Suzannah also co-edited two books. With Professor Tom Betteridge, she edited Henry VIII and the Court: Art, Politics, and Performance (Ashgate, 2013), co-wrote the introduction, and contributed her own chapter on 'The fall of Anne Boleyn: A crisis of gender relations?'. With Helen Carr, she edited What is History, Now? (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2021). For this, Suzannah co-wrote the introduction and contributed an essay called ‘How can we recover the lost lives of women?’

Broadcaster

Suzannah is well-known as a broadcast historian. She has made more than 50 hours of TV, all of it history documentaries for BBC 4, ITV, Channel 5, More4, Yesterday, UKTV, National Geographic, and PBS. These series include Walking Tudor England, London: 2000 Years of History, Elizabeth I, The Great Fire of London, and Witches: A Century of Murder, all of which were broadcast in the US on Netflix. She presented the Hidden Killers of the… Home series for BBC 4 (PBS), two Bloody Tales series for National Geographic, and Nicholas and Alexandra: The Letters with Suzannah Lipscomb for UKTV (APT/PBS). Suzannah was also host and writer of Henry and Anne: The Lovers Who Changed History and co-writer/co-host of Henry VIII and His Six Wives (both Channel 5). The Sunday Times praised it for “telling overlooked stories here, treating the wives in Henry's life as queens and women, rather than marital appendages.”

Suzannah featured throughout BBC 2 (PBS)’s The Last Days of Anne Boleyn and Netflix's series Blood, Sex, and Royalty: Anne Boleyn. She appeared as resident historian on BBC 2’s comedy panel show, Insert Name Here, and on Channel 4’s Time Team. She's even been in Dictionary Corner on Countdown with the peerless Susie Dent, on Celebrity Pointless, and Celebrity Antiques Roadtrip.

She is a royal contributor for NBC.

Suzannah is also the host of the chart-topping podcast, Not Just the Tudors, from History Hit. She also presented the award-winning podcast Irreplaceable: A History of England in 100 Places.

The Financial Times has described Suzannah as “a fluent broadcaster with mass appeal whose academic work exemplifies scholarly rigour.”