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Laura Flannigan

Woman with long brown hair standing in front of a leafy background

Laura Flannigan

Warner Woodring Chair and Assistant Professor
She/her

flannigan.15@osu.edu

Areas of Expertise

  • British History
  • Administrative History: government, procedures, state formation
  • Legal History: Law, Litigation, and Legal Records
  • Social History: poverty, status, social relations

Education

  • St John's College, University of Oxford, Junior Research Fellow (2021-25)
  • University of Cambridge, PhD in History (2020)
  • University of York, U.K., MA in Early Modern History (2017)
  • University of York, U.K., BA in History (2016)

Dr Laura Flannigan is Assistant Professor and the Warner Woodring Chair. She is originally from the U.K., where she undertook all of her education. She joined The Ohio State University in Autumn 2025 from Oxford University, where she held a Junior Research Fellowship at St John's College.

Dr Flannigan's research re-examines the relationship between government and society in England between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries - when the Tudor monarchs sat the throne. By revealing how ordinary people litigated their personal suits before the Crown, her work alters our perception of who had a hand in shaping Tudor England and its governance. These findings were the subject of her first book, Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, 1485-1547 (Cambridge University Press, 2024). The legal records that formed the basis for this project were published in calendar form as Hearings of the Court of Requests, two volumes with the List and Index Society (2023). 

Her current research looks more broadly at the litigious society of early/pre-modern England. In an age of legal pluralism but relatively limited literacy, who knew what about the law - its procedures and substance - and how? Examining personal writings about law, in domestic archives and in commonplace books (or notebooks), it becomes possible to glimpse the proactive acquisition of legal knowledge by laypeople. Initial research from this project has been published in Dr Flannigan's latest article: 'Narrating Disputes: litigation and its retellings in fifteenth-century England'. 

She is also currently co-editing a collection of essays on the theme of Researching with English Court Records 1200-1700,  for Routledge's Guides to Using Primary Sources series.

Dr Flannigan is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her research has been awarded the Sir John Neale Prize in Early Modern History (2020) and the Royal Historical Society's First Book Prize (2025). She will hold a short-term research fellowship at The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. in June 2026.

 

Courses Taught

Autumn 2025

HIST 3641: Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe

 

 

 

People Filters:

European History; Early Modern European History
Medieval History
Power, Culture, and the State
Social Justice
Women's, Gender, and Sexuality History