Lorna Hutson appointed as Merton Professor of English Literature

Lorna Hutson, Berry Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews, has been appointed as Merton Professor of English Literature, with effect from 1 September 2016.

Lorna Hutson did her MA and DPhil at Somerville College, Oxford, and after a research fellowship at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, taught at Queen Mary, London, Hull, the University of California at Berkeley and St Andrews. She has held fellowships from the Folger, the Huntington, the Guggenheim, the AHRC and the Leverhulme Trust. Lorna's interests are in the relationship between literary form and the formal aspects of non-literary culture. Latterly she has shown how questions of proof and evidence shaped English Renaissance drama. Recent and forthcoming work includes the editing of Ben Jonson’s Discoveries (1641) for the Cambridge Complete Works of Ben Jonson (2012), The Invention of Suspicion (2007), which won the Roland Bainton Prize for Literature in 2008 and Circumstantial Shakespeare (2015) based on the Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures, 2012. She is currently working on a Leverhulme funded project on 16th century Anglo-Scottish literary relations and editing, with Bradin Cormack, the Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700. With Professor John Hudson she directs CMEMLL, the Centre for Mediaeval and Early Modern Law and Literature.

Professor Hutson commented:

"I am delighted to be appointed to the Merton Chair, which gives me the opportunity to work amid such rich resources and make contact with colleagues in so many different areas of early modern research. I hope, while continuing to foster the law-literary connection that I find compelling, to learn a great deal from the diversity I encounter at Oxford."