Naomi Baker

Specific research interests:

English Renaissance literature and drama; literature and theology; literature and philosophy; seventeenth-century women's writing; radical religious writing. 

I have published widely on early modern literature and drama. My latest book, Voices of Thunder: Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century (Reaktion Books, 2025), introduces more than a dozen little-known seventeenth-century women, demonstrating the ways in which their radical Protestantism enabled them to resist the status quo. 

I have also published a critical edition of two Puritan conversion narratives, Scripture Women: Rose Thurgood, 'A Lecture of Repentance' and Cicely Johnson, 'Fanatical Reveries' (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2005). Written in the 1630s, these texts are among the earliest known English conversion narratives. The fact that both of the authors were female, and that one of them was poor to the point of starvation (the other was of the 'middling sort'), makes the texts even more remarkable.

My previous book, Plain Ugly: The Unattractive Body in Early Modern Culture (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2010), discusses representations of physical unattractiveness in early modern England as a means of analysing the changing relationship between the body and the self in this era. 

I have also published articles on early modern drama and Protestant theology. 

Naomi Baker studied at the University of Oxford and the University of Manchester, where she completed a PhD thesis on early modern women's autobiographical writing. She held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, during which she completed a critical edition of two of the earliest known English conversion narratives, both of which were written by women. She has subsequently taught and researched at the University of Manchester and has been a visiting academic at the University of Queensland (2019). 

She is General Editor of Literature and Theology.

Supervision areas:

English Renaissance drama and literature, seventeenth-century religious writing, literature and theology.

Past and current areas of supervision include projects on English Renaissance drama, early modern devotional poetry, seventeenth-century life writing and early Quaker writing. 

Please get in touch if you are interested in postgraduate study in any of the areas mentioned above.

Email address:

[email protected]