Laura Ashe

Professor Laura Ashe FRHistS
Occupation(s)	Literary scholar and academic
Title	Professor of English Literature
Academic background
Education	Leeds Girls' High School
Alma mater	Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge Harvard University
Academic work
Discipline	English studies, History
Sub-discipline	Medieval studies, Renaissance studies
Institutions	Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge Queen Mary University of London Worcester College, Oxford

Laura Ashe FRHistS is a British historian of English medieval literature, history and culture (c. 1000–1550). She lectures in English and is a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford.

Academic career

Ashe was educated at Leeds Girls' High School. She went on to read English at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. She spent the year after her graduation as a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University.

During her graduate studies she was appointed to a junior research fellowship at Gonville and Caius College.

Prior to joining Worcester College in 2008, Ashe spent two years lecturing at Queen Mary University of London.

In 2009 Ashe won a Philip Leverhulme Prize, for the international impact of her research. She was awarded the Title of Distinction of Professor of English Literature by the University of Oxford in September 2018.

Media appearances

In 2015 Ashe was the presenter for BBC Radio 3's A Cultural History of the Plague and has taken part as an expert panelist for BBC Radio 4's In Our Time on the topics of The 12th Century Renaissance, Beowulf, Chivalry Le Morte d'Arthur, Purgatory, Thomas Becket and Gawain and the Green Knight.

She contributed to Art that Made Us, an eight-part BBC Two TV series in 2022 presenting an alternate history of Britain through art and literature.

Ashe appeared as an interviewee in the mockumentary series Cunk on Britain (2018) and Cunk on Earth (2022).

Selected publications

• Ashe, Laura (2016), Richard II: a brittle glory, Penguin Monarchs, Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, ISBN 978-0141979892
• Ashe, Laura (2015), Early Fiction in England: from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Chaucer, Penguin Classics, Penguin Books, ISBN 978-0141392875
• Ashe, Laura; Patterson, Ian (2014), War and Literature, Essays and Studies, v. 67, Boydell & Brewer Ltd, ISBN 978-1843843818
• Ashe, Laura (2011), Fiction and History in England, 1066-1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 68, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0521174367
• Ashe, Laura; Djordjević, Ivana; Weiss, Judith (2010), The Exploitations of Medieval Romance, Studies in Medieval Romance, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-1846157882