College position(s)
Life Fellow
Subject
English
Professor James Simpson
Degrees, Awards and Prizes
BA (Melbourne), MPhil (Oxon), PhD
Research themes
My scholarship is attempting to shape a new configuration in English Studies, a field that might be called Trans-Reformation Studies, ranging from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries.
My most recent books are each devoted to that larger project: Reform and Cultural Revolution, being volume 2 in the Oxford English Literary History (Oxford University Press, 2002), Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Harvard University Press, 2007). And Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2010).
Other
I am currently the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English, and Chair of English at Harvard University (2004-).
Despite not being able to come often to the old Cambridge, my attachment to it remains very warm and strong from the newer Cambridge. At Cambridge, I was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English between 1999 and 2003, and before that a University Lecturer between 1989 and 1999.
I grew up and was educated in Melbourne, Australia (Scotch College and the University of Melbourne), where I am an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
2007 Recipient of British Academy Sir Israel Gollancz Prize, for Reform and Cultural Revolution.
2008 Recipient of Silver Medal, 2008 Independent Publisher Book Awards, for Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Religion category).
2008-2013 Harvard College Professor.
2011-2012 Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship, FAS, Harvard University, 2011-12, for Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition.
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