Laura Ashe

Professor Laura Ashe is a leading scholar in medieval English literature and culture (c. 1000–1550), holding the David Woods Kemper Family Fellowship at Worcester College, Oxford. Her work bridges literary analysis with historical and philosophical inquiry, focusing on the intersections of medieval ethics, subjectivity, and literary innovation. She is particularly noted for her studies on Chaucer, the development of romance genres, and the cultural impacts of medieval conquests.

Her research explores multilingual literary traditions in post-Conquest England, the invention of fiction, and the evolution of chivalric ideals. Key projects include Chaucer's Ethical Philosophy (2025) and co-edited volumes like Conquests in Eleventh-Century England (2020). She has held prestigious fellowships including the Morton Bloomfield Visiting Fellowship at Harvard (2016).

Public engagement includes the Penguin Classics volume Early Fiction in England (2015) and contributions to interdisciplinary histories like Penguin Monarchs: Richard II (2016). Current projects include a major study on the history of love across medieval and early modern periods.

Awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2009) and Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2015), her work appears in top journals like Studies in the Age of Chaucer and Journal of English and Germanic Philology. She co-edits New Medieval Literatures, fostering scholarly collaboration in the field.