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, an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.
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 Christopher 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.