Lauren Working is Lecturer in Early Modern Studies at the University of York. She specialises in Tudor and Stuart sociability, politics, art, and colonialism. Her publications include The Making of an Imperial Polity, which jointly won the Royal Historical Society’s 2021 Whitfield Prize, and a 2024 introduction to Shakespeare’s The Tempest for Oxford World’s Classics, which explores the play through topics including plantation, ecology, and material culture.
Lauren has co-curated exhibitions at London’s Middle Temple Library and Oxford’s Bodleian Library, both of which showcased rare books and manuscripts alongside new artworks by the globemaker and ceramicist Loraine Rutt. With the World Museum (Liverpool), she worked with curators and the poet Sarah Howe on ‘I, too, am a Survivor’, an immersive exhibition about migration and shipwrecked porcelain that culminated in the permanent re-display of the gallery’s Chinese ceramics.
Lauren is an advisor and consultant for several museums and heritage organisations, including the National Trust and National Portrait Gallery. She was involved with the NPG’s major renovation project, ‘Inspiring People’, and has developed sessions and resources for the gallery’s Tudors A-Level programme.
She is currently writing a trade book on the influence of the Americas on Tudor and Stuart art and literature.