Every year, BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) hold a nationwide search for academics with game changing ideas that will resonate with a wide audience, and it is with great pleasure that we can announce that Dr Lauren Working has been named a New Generation Thinker.

These New Generation Thinkers represent some of the brightest minds in the country and their research has the potential to redefine our understanding of everything from our history to the way we speak.

The New Generation Thinkers will have the prestigious opportunity to communicate their research by making programmes for BBC radio. They will also be provided with unique access to training and support from AHRC and the BBC. New Generation Thinkers alumni have gone on to become prominent public figures in their fields as well as the face of major documentaries, TV series, and regular figures in public debate.

Lauren Working wants us to look at ruffs and colonial fashion, at plants and porcelain depicted in still life paintings. Her first book The Making of an Imperial Polity, and it explores how English colonial projects in the Americas, from Venezuela to Virginia, influenced taste and politics in early seventeenth-century London. She has published on topics including intoxicants and rituals of sociability, Jamestown archaeology, and Native American artefacts. Lauren freelances for the National Portrait Gallery and is developing projects that use material culture to explore the entangled histories of colonialism and English heritage.