Lauren Working

My research focuses on early modern politics, taste, and empire. It seeks to reconstruct Anglo-Indigenous relations using texts, plantation archaeology, and museum collections, including portraits at the London National Portrait Gallery and South American featherwork at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. My book, The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis (Cambridge University Press, 2020), explores the entanglement between Native American lifeways and political culture in London, arguing that the civil identities of the governing elite became bound up in colonial intervention and the cultivation of American spaces. Related to this, I am interested in how American commodities and artefacts – tobacco leaves, beaver furs, shell beads – left their places of origin and were appropriated in new contexts in London. I am currently working on an article on how cavalier poets and artists imagined Madagascar in the 1630s; and another on early Stuart plantation landscapes and their connections to English estates and pleasure grounds. An ongoing element of my research is about heritage and how we confront the legacies of colonialism in country houses, plantation sites, and museum displays, including the place of contemporary art and poetry in ‘speaking back’ to historical material.

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