Naomi Baker

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 teaches and researches English Renaissance literature and culture, with a particular focus on the intersections of literature and theology. She has published widely on English Renaissance drama and literature, as well as seventeenth-century women's writing. Her first book - 'Plain Ugly: The Unattractive Body in Early Modern Culture' (MUP, 2010) examines representations of ugliness in early modern literature, drama and culture. Her latest book - 'Voices of Thunder: Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century' (Reaktion Books, 2025) - explores the incredible lives and writings of a dozen seventeenth-century English Protestant women.

Naomi Baker is an associate editor of the journal 'Literature and Theology' (Oxford University Press).

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 first 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 culture 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.