Professor of History, Lancaster University

Naomi is a distinguished early modernist, whose published work has focused on the history of the family, language and texts, and practices of reading from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Much of her work revolves around the study of social relations, and their manifestations in language and text.

Her first book investigated changing conceptions of kinship, family, and social networks. Her subsequent monograph explored how concepts of social description were coined in English Bibles, from Wycliffe and Tyndale to King James, and their broader intellectual and social resonances especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Her current project, ‘Cultures of Settlement’, investigates the relationship between society and the state with particular reference to the migration of the poor in England from the Restoration to the nineteenth century. In 2015–16, she held a British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship to work this project. In 2018 she was awarded a Distinguished Chair at the Huntington Library. Her book The settlement of the poor in England c. 1660–1780: law, society, and state formation will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2024.

From 2015 to 2017, Naomi led a task group for an EU COST network on lexicography. She served on the Royal Historical Society Council, as well as the Economic History Society Board, where she represented the Social History Society. Currently she serves on AHRC’s Peer Review and Strategic Colleges and acts as an ERC Evaluator.

Key Publications

• 'The settlement of the poor and the rise of the form in England c.1662-1780' in Past & Present (2017)
• 'Kinship in Britain and beyond from the Early Modern Period to the Present' special issue of Continuity and Change (edited with Richard Smith) (2010)
• The social universe of the English Bible: scripture, society, and culture in early modern England (2010)
• Family and friends in eighteenth-century England: household, kinship, and patronage (2001)