Laura Ashe

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).