William James Simpson

William James Simpson (born 16 March 1954, Melbourne) is an Australian-American medievalist.

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 Fellow and College Lecturer at Girton College (1989–1999), a professor at the University of Cambridge (1999–2003), before accepting an appointment at Harvard University, where since 2006 he is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English.^[1]

Awards

• Silver Medal, Independent Publisher Book Awards - Religion category (2008)
• British Academy Sir Israel Gollancz Prize - Reform and Cultural Revolution (2007)
• 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)
• Jane Herbert Memorial Fellowship, Westfield College, University of London (1987)
• Paget Toynbee Dante Alighieri Prize, Oxford University (1980)

Work

His early work centred on literary analysis of poetry, especially the late 14th century English poem, Piers Plowman.^[2] He later worked on Medieval Humanism. In 2002, he published an award winning literary history.^[3] His most recent work, "Burning to Read"^[4] centres on the fundamentalist Bible reading in the early 16th century.

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 University Press USA, 2011)
• Reynard the Fox: A New Translation (2015)

Editor

• 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
• John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, ed. Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006)]
• 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]
• 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

References