Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin

I am an early modern historian with expertise in artisanal cultures, urban space and architecture, and networks of craft, ‘scientific’ and medical knowledge. My published work has explored themes such as embodied knowledge and occupational identities, material cultures of memorialisation, gifting rites among artisans and merchants, and experimental urban spaces.

My first monograph, Crafting Identities: Artisan Culture in London, c.1500-1640 (MUP, 2021), demonstrated how livery halls became multifunctional sites for technical innovation, civic memorialisation, and social and political exchange. Crafting Identities was short-listed for the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion in 2022, awarded by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. My latest book, co-authored with Rebekah Higgitt, is Metropolitan Science: London Sites and Cultures of Knowledge and Practice, c.1600-1800 (Bloomsbury, 2024). We present a new history of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century urban science and innovation that is rooted in artisanal, commercial, and mercantile spaces, and material and instrumental expertise.

I joined Cardiff University in 2020 as Lecturer in Early Modern History (on the Disglair Lecturers scheme). Prior to this, I was a postdoctoral researcher on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project, Metropolitan Science, at the University of Kent (2017-20), and Fellow in History at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge (2016-17).