Dr Laura Sangha (she/her)

Laura is Associate Professor of Early Modern History in the Archaeology and History department, specialising in English religion and culture in the long Reformation, c. 1450-1700. She is currently Co-Investigator on the Leverhulme Project The Material Culture of Wills, England 1540-1790 where the project team are working with volunteers to transcribe, analyse and make freely available 25,000 wills. Laura is the author of Angels and Belief in England 1480-1700 (Pickering & Chatto, 2012), she has also published on individual devotion (Historical Research, 2019) and ghost beliefs (Historical Journal, 2020), and co-edited Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources (Routledge, 2016 - a second edition is currently in production).

In 2025 Laura was selected to host an Exeter Arts and Culture Creative Fellow for the project 'Wills as Windows onto Past Lives'. The fellowships are exploratory placements offering creative practitioners the opportunity to engage with staff at the University, using current research as a springboard for conversation, reflection and collaborative development of ideas. Laura is collaborating with Devon based composer, arranger, lyricist and performer Chris Hoban and they are organising a series of workshops and performances to showcase the fruits of this work. 

Laura designs and teaches modules on Tudor and Stuart England; supernatural belief; and religion, politics and society c.1480-1700. She also contributes to survey modules on the medieval and early modern periods, on historical theory and skills, to the History department's two core first year undergraduate modules on methodology and historiography, and to MA modules on religion, critical approaches and early modern gender. She has been Co-Director of Exeter's Centre for Early Modern Studies since 2019.

Laura served as an elected member of Senate 2018-22, representing the College of Humanities at the senior governing forum for academic staff at the university; as Humanities Inclusion Representative 2019-21, working with a number of different groups to nuture an inclusive and supportive environment at Exeter and to promote equality on campus for staff and students; and as the History Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Officer 2019-22. She is a member of the Archaeology and History Athena SWAN committee, and is a member of the Decolonising History group - if you are a member of the department and would like to get involved with this work then please do get in touch.

Beyond university, Laura is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Higher Education Academy. She is a series editor for Liverpool University Press Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Belief and Culture and member of the Paper Trails editorial board for UCL Press. Paper Trails is a BOOC - Books as Open Online Content - an innovative new open access platform that allows for multi-form contributions, including peer-reviewed articles, more adaptive object/document/item profiles, research stories, and reflections on practice.

Finally, Laura is one of four co-authors of the many-headed monster, a collaborative research blog on all things early modern, and she has a professional Bluesky account: @lsangha.bsky.social.

Biography

After attending a state school Laura was the first generation in her family to go to university, graduating with a history degree in the early 2000s. She spent three years working outside of academia and then returned to complete an MA in early modern history, continuing on to doctoral study under the supervision of Professor Peter Marshall at the University of Warwick. Laura received her doctorate in 2009 and was subsequently awarded a six month Early Career Fellowship from the Institute of Advanced Studies at Warwick, held in conjunction with teaching duties. She was appointed as a temporary Teaching Fellow at the University of Exeter in September 2010, and was appointed to a Lectureship in British History 1500-1700 in July 2012.