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Lauren Working

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Profile

Biography

Lauren Working is a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Literature and a member of the interdisciplinary Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. Her research focuses on sixteenth and seventeenth-century literary sociability, material culture, and colonialism. Her book, The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis (Cambridge University Press, 2020), explores how colonial projects and the circulation of plantation goods transformed ideas of civil refinement in Jacobean London. She has published articles on topics including intoxicants, wit poetry, female agents, Madagascar, and Jamestown archaeology in The Historical Journal, The Sixteenth Century Journal, Renaissance Studies, and British Art Studies, among others. Her new introduction to Shakespeare’s The Tempest was published in 2024. 

Lauren’s research operates at the intersection of literature, history, archaeology, and art history. She has worked with several museums and archaeological sites to develop ways of using artefacts and heritage spaces to reinterpret Anglo-Indigenous relations and early modern colonial histories. She is a freelancer for the National Portrait Gallery and a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. 

Research

Overview

Lauren's research focuses on how colonialism and encounters with Indigenous people transformed English politics, taste, and literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Exploring everything from tobacco poetry at the fashionable Inns of Court to the presence of Indigenous featherwork on stages and in households, her work is driven by an interest in how colonialism and knowledge about the Americas influenced English literary sociability on both sides of the Atlantic. Her research has been supported by fellowships at the Jamestown archaeological site, the Huntington Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Paul Mellon Centre, and the Yale Center for British Art, among others. 
 
Her first book, The Making of an Imperial Polity (Cambridge University Press, 2020), jointly won the Royal Historical Society's 2021 Whitfield Prize. Her co-authored book, Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility in Early Modern England (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), explores 36 terms that were central to the conceptualization of identity and race in Tudor and Stuart England. Recent or forthcoming articles and chapters include microhistories and women's interests in colonialism, global networks at the Inns of Court, a wit poem about Madagascar, and a transatlantic view of Whitehall's Banqueting House. She is also the author of a trade book called A Golden World: How the Americas Transformed Renaissance England, published by Faber in 2026.
 
Lauren’s research involves sustained collaboration with museums and heritage organizations, including consultancy work for the National Trust and National Portrait Gallery. From 2018-21, as part of her work on the TIDE project at the University of Oxford, she helped lead a project at the World Museum (National Museums Liverpool) that culminated in an immersive, permanent redisplay of the museum’s pre-modern Chinese ceramics, using porcelain, poetry, and tales of Tudor travel. In September 2021, she co-curated From Middle Temple to Manoa at the Middle Temple Library in London. In 2023, this exhibition found a new iteration as Oxford's Global Networks at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Supervision

Lauren welcomes proposals for PhD research on sixteenth and seventeenth-century English literature and history, especially from a global or transatlantic perspective, including Tudor and Stuart travel literature, material culture, literary sociability, plantation, colonialism, and empire. 

Teaching

Undergraduate

Lauren teaches and lectures across the department, including on The Renaissance, The Shock of the New, Approaches to Literature II: Other Worlds, Research Now, and Postgraduate Life in Practice. Her advanced option module on Renaissance Global Travel is a chance to study English travel writing alongside global objects and literature.

Postgraduate

At MA level, she teaches on Shakespeare and the interdisciplinary Approaches to Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. She is the convenor of the MA in Renaissance Literature, 1500–1700. She is an accredited Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

External activities

Overview

As a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, Lauren's programmes have appeared on BBC Radio 3 to discuss topics ranging from ruffs in Jamestown to cavalier style, and she has been a regular guest on BBC Radio 4's Free Thinking ('Trade and Traffic', 'The Mayflower and Native American History', 'Gifts and Gratitude', 'The Botanical Past'). Her museum work involves ongoing consultancy for the National Portrait Gallery and the National Trust, and a contribution to the catalogue for the forthcoming 'Elizabethan Splendor' exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut.

Lauren has discussed her research for A Golden World on podcasts including Drafting the Past, Not Just the Tudors, Talking Tudors, This Guy Sucked, The Scholar's Armchair, Vulgar History, and Australia's ABC Nightlife. The book was listed in the Financial Times' 'Books to Read in 2026', and she has given public talks and tours related to this subject at museums including Queen's House, Greenwich, the National Portrait Gallery, and the V&A. 

Contact details

Dr Lauren Working
Department of English and Related Literature
University of York
Heslington
York
YO10 5DD

Tel: +44 (0)1904 323334