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Lauren Working

Biography

Lauren Working is a 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, and Renaissance 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. 

Contact details

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

Tel: +44 (0)1904 323334