James Simpson is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Research Professor of English at Harvard University (2004-). He was formerly based at the University of Cambridge, where he was a University Lecturer in English (1989-1999) and Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English (1999-2003). He is a Life Fellow of Girton College and an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Simpson was educated at Scotch College Melbourne, Melbourne University (BA, Hons) and the University of Oxford (MPhil). He holds a doctorate from the University of Cambridge. He has written the following monographs: Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text (Longman, 1990) (second, revised edition, 2007); Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Reform and Cultural Revolution, volume 2 in the Oxford English Literary History (Oxford University Press, 2002) (winner of the British Academy Sir Israel Gollancz Prize, 2007); Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Harvard University Press, 2007); Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2010); and Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019).
His editions include the following: John Hardyng, Chronicle, Edited from British Library MS Lansdowne 204, edited by Sarah Peverley and James Simpson, Volume 1 (Kalamazoo: MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2015); The Oxford Chaucer, edited by Chrisopher Cannon and James Simpson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024); and The Norton Anthology of English Literature, General Editor Stephen Greenblatt, “The Middle Ages,” eleventh edition, “The Middle Ages”, edited by Julie Orlemanski and James Simpson (New York: W. W. Norton, 2024).
His translation of Reynard the Fox was published by Liveright (2015).
Simpson has enjoyed visiting fellowships at the following universities and institutions: Free University, Berlin (2021, 2016); Wissenschaftkskolleg, Berlin (2017-18); Paris, Sorbonne (2017); University of Melbourne (2015); Huntington Library (2013-14); Jadavpur University, Kolkata (2007).
He has published more than 100 academic articles.
Late medieval and early modern Western European literature, 1150-1690; the cultural disciplines of revolutionary evangelical modernity, and how we survived them.