Ulinka Rublack was born in Tuebingen in 1967 and studied in Hamburg and Cambridge. She completed her PhD in Cambridge under the supervision of the late R.W. Scribner, was elected as Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College and offered a lectureship at Cambridge University in 1996. She has taught at the History Faculty ever since, was appointed to a chair in 2013 and elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2017. From September 2017, she chairs the UK’s German History Society. Rublack has published widely on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture as well as on methodological concerns. Her books have been translated into German, Italian and Chinese.
Her most recent monograph, ‘The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Fight for his Mother’, presents the untold story of how the persecution of witchcraft affected families and recasts our sense of Kepler’s life and times (Oxford University Press, October 2015). It brings to life a Lutheran community one hundred years after the Reformation began, on the eve of the Thirty Years’ War. ‘The Astronomer’ was an Observer Book of the Year and has inspired a unique interdisciplinary opera project – see the website Keplerstrial.com . The opera will be performed at the Victoria & Albert Museum in November 2017.
She is sole editor of the ‘Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations’ (December 2016) as well as of the ‘Oxford Concise Companion to History’, whose contributors are the late Sir Christopher Bayly, R. Bin Wong, Donald Kelley, Bonnie Smith, Kenneth Pomeranz, Christopher Clark, Peter Burke, Pat Thane, Dorothy Ko, Megan Vaughan, Elizabeth Buettner, Pamela Smith, John McNeill, Miri Rubin, Eiko Ikegami and Anthony Grafton.
Her previous monographs include ‘Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Early Modern Europe’, also published by Oxford University Press, which explores the relation between dress and identities in the period, won the Bainton Prize and was one of six books nominated for the Cundill Prize, the largest non-fiction history book prize in the world.
Ulinka Rublack is sole founder of the Cambridge History for Schools outreach programme; she is a co-founder of what became the Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies and has served on its working party for over ten years.

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