Emily Cockayne

Cheek by Jowl. A History of Neighbours followed in 2012. A reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement noted that Cockayne's 'approach is to furnish every theme and every chapter with so much evidence that at times it reads like a thesis that the author must defend as she goes along'. A reviewer in Literary Review described Cheek by Jowl in a similar vein as 'authoritative if heavy-going'; while The Telegraph noted that 'Cockayne does not marshal her subject particularly linearly ... [but] crisply accounts for our disappearing notion of neighbourliness'.

In 2007, Cockayne published Hubbub. Filth, Noise & Stench in England 1600-1770. A reviewer in The Independent commented: 'Cockayne draws us into a world where snickleways (narrow, often noisome passages) might be contaminated by fallen axunge (pig fat used to grease axles) or the overflow from a "house of easement"'. The book has been described as 'a treasure-house of material for scholars'. Toni Morrison said Hubbub was 'a really extraordinary book', and that it had influenced her 2008 novel A Mercy. Hubbub is often included in academic bibliographies of seminal works in modern urban history and the history of everyday life.

Cockayne was educated at the University of Cambridge, where she took a first-class degree in history in 1994. She received the Members' History Prize in 1997. She wrote a doctoral thesis at Jesus College, Cambridge, under the supervision of Robert W. Scribner and Keith Wrightson, and was awarded her PhD in 2000. She was a Prize Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and afterwards lectured at the Open University. She is currently a lecturer in early modern history at the University of East Anglia.

Emily Cockayne (born 1973) is a British historian, known for her work on the history of sensory nuisance.