James Simpson (academic)

James Simpson (born 16 March 1954 in Melbourne) is an Australian-British-American medievalist currently serving as the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University.

Education

• Educated at Scotch College (1966–1971)
• Arts Degree with Honours at Melbourne University, Melbourne (1976)
• Master of Philosophy, University of Oxford 1980
• Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Cambridge (1996)

Career

Simpson has worked in academia in Australia, the UK, and the USA, where he has taught medieval literature. He was a University Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge (1989-1999), Fellow and College Lecturer at Girton College, University of Cambridge (1989–1999) and Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge (1999–2003). He then worked at Harvard University (2003-) where he was appointed "Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English" (2004-).

Awards

• Paget Toynbee Dante Alighieri Prize, Oxford University (1980)
• Jane Herbert Memorial Fellowship, Westfield College, University of London (1987)
• Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge University
• Honorary Fellow, Australian Academy of the Humanities (2003)
• John Hurt Fisher Prize - “Significant Contribution to the Field of John Gower Studies,” John Gower Society (2003)
• British Academy Sir Israel Gollancz Prize - Reform and Cultural Revolution (2007)
• Silver Medal, Independent Publisher Book Awards - Religion category (2008) for "Burning to Read"

Work

His early work centered on literary analysis of poetry, especially the late 14th century English poem, Piers Plowman. He later worked on Medieval Humanism. In 2002, he published an award winning literary history: "The Oxford English Literary History: 1350-1547 : reform and cultural revolution". His work Burning to Read centres on the fundamentalist Bible reading in the early 16th century. His most recent books are Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition, and Permanent Revolution: the Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism.

Works

Author

• Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1990)
• Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille’s “Anticlaudianus” and John Gower’s “Confessio amantis”, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 25 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
• Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350-1547, Vol 2 of The Oxford English Literary History (Oxford University Press, 2002)
• Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text, second, revised edition (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2007)
• Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)
• Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)
• Reynard the Fox: A New Translation (New York: Liveright/Norton, 2015)
• Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019)

Editor

• Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of G. H. Russell, edited by Gregory Kratzmann and James Simpson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986, 250 pp. 133–153
• Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England, edited by Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), xiv + 250 pp. 2005]
• John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, ed. Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006)]
• The Norton Anthology of English Literature, General Editors Stephen Greenblatt and M. H. Abrams; “The Middle Ages”, ed. Alfred David and James Simpson (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 1-484
• Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, edited by Brian Cummings and James Simpson, Twenty-First Century Approaches, 2 (Oxford University Press, 2010)
• John Hardyng, Chronicle: Edited from British Library MS Lansdowne 204, co-edited with Sarah Peverley (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2015)
• The Norton Anthology of English Literature, General Editor Stephen Greenblatt, tenth edition; “The Middle Ages,” ed. James Simpson (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017)