Lauren Working
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Profile
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.
Research
Overview
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 has appeared on BBC Radio 3 to discuss topics ranging from ruffs in Jamestown to cavalier style. She is involved in ongoing consultancy work with the National Portrait Gallery and the National Trust (see 'Research' tab). She is a member of the British Art Network and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Lauren is currently finishing a trade book called A Golden World, to be published by Faber in 2026. It tells a history of the English Renaissance through transatlantic objects and their makers, tracing sunflowers, muskrats, embroidered animal skins and Aztec codices from Indigenous environments to Tudor interiors and baroque masterpieces.