Laura Gowing is professor of womenâÂÂs history and early modern history at King's College London. She received her PhD from Royal Holloway, London, supervised by Lyndal Roper, where she was subsequently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. She lectured at the Universities of Hertfordshire and Essex before KingâÂÂs, and is a member of the editorial board of History Workshop Journal. Gowing was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2023.
Gowing's research relates to early modern England, women, gender, the body, sexuality, crime, and London. Much of her work uses legal records as a source for the history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women, with a particular focus on language and the body. Her first book Domestic Dangers revealed high numbers of London women litigating and testifying about sex and marriage, arguing for a 'language of insult' that defined women through sexual reputation, and demonstrating womenâÂÂs authoritative use of the law. In Common Bodies (2003), Gowing recaptured the bodily experiences of ordinary women, critiquing the approaches of Thomas W. Laqueur and Michel Foucault to the history of the body in the early modern period in a book that was positively reviewed in The Guardian.