ABOUT Judith

After a successful corporate career, Judith returned to academia as an independent historian.  Experience as a magna cum laude graduate of Smith College, holder of a doctorate in modern European history with academic distinction from New York University, veteran of corporate America, mother and grandmother, enriches Judith’s perspective.

Her first book, Dorothea Lieven; A Russian Princess in London and Paris 1785-1857, returns to the subject of Judith’s doctoral dissertation, “Changes in British Foreign Policy towards France as a Result of Changes in Government, 1841-1846.”  Published in 2007 after ten years of meticulous research in New York, and state archives in major European capitals, Dorothea Lieven tells the tale of a remarkable female who changed the course of history.  Florence Nightingale, Feminist,  Cromwell’s second book, published in 2013, recounts Florence’s riveting story from a post-feminist perspective. Good Queen Anne; Appraising the Life and Reign of the Last Stuart Monarch, published in 2019, is the first nuanced biography of a wise and popular ruler undeservedly either maligned or ignored by posterity.

Judith entered the international world of Wall Street in 1973 as one of its few female executives. She established a global firm’s company-wide information center, then founded the firm’s market research department where she organized, executed, and presented strategic planning projects. Judith was elected a member of the YWCA Academy of Women Achievers.

The author not only thrived in the clubby male world of Wall Street, but also, as a single working parent, raised two children. Judith is herself the daughter of a pioneering female physician, one of a handful admitted to the staff of New York Hospital in the early 1950s.

Judith’s European background and knowledge of languages; her experience as a wife and mother; her familiarity with living in foreign cultures; her insight gained as one of the first female executives in a male world dominated by international relations, uniquely qualify her to tell Dorothea Lieven’s story. As a successful example of the Feminist era, Judith is especially fitted to tell Florence Nightingale’s remarkable narrative from a post-feminist viewpoint. As a woman, daughter, parent, corporate executive, and scholar Judith brings practical experience and solid academic credentials to bear in her re-examination of Queen Anne. Because she has written three historical biographies about complex and famous women who have shaped European history, Judith is qualified not only to apply her practical experience and academic qualifications to her assessment of Vigée Le Brun, but also to meet the challenge of conveying this artist’s compelling story to the modern reader.

Judith Cromwell lives in New York surrounded by her children and grand-children.