Greg Walker

Professor Greg Walker is Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature, having previously been the Masson Professor of English at Edinburgh. Before that he was Professor of Early-Modern Literature and Culture and Director of the Medieval Research Centre at the University of Leicester.

He gained a BA in English and History and a PhD in early-Tudor literature and history from the University of Southampton, was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Southampton and has also taught at the Universities of Queensland and Buckingham.

He is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Historical Society, the English Association, the Society of Antiquaries, and the Agder Vitenskapsakademi (Agder Academy of Letters and Sciences, Norway), former Chair of the Council for College and University English, Chair of the Advisory Board and a member of the Council of the AHRC. he was a member of the RAE sub-panel for English in 2008, Deputy Chair of the REF sub-panel for 2014, and a member of the ‘Impact’ pilot panel in 2010. In 2015 he was International Assessor on the Humanities and Creative Arts Panel for the Australian Excellence in Research Assessment (ERA).

He is co-editor, with Elaine Treharne, of the Oxford Textual Perspectives monograph series (Oxford University Press), and with Martin Stannard of Studies in European Cultural Transition (Ashgate), Chair of the Judges for the James Tait Black Memorial Book Prizes and a member of the Editorial Board of the journals Medieval English Theatre, Literature Compass;PE:ER, Research in Medieval and Renaissance Drama andReformation. He has published widely in the fields of Medieval and Early-Modern drama, literature, and History. In his spare time he is a passionate advocate of two potentially lost causes, Nottingham Forest Football Club and progressive rock music.

Greg has written widely on late-medieval drama and poetry, Renaissance literature, the history of the stage in the period before the building of the professional playhouses, and the cultural consequences of the Henrician Reformation. He has also published on the early films of Alexander Korda and popular music in the 1970s.

He was Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded 'Staging and Representing the Scottish Renaissance Court' project, with Professor Thomas Betteridge (Oxford Brookes University) and colleagues in Edinburgh, Southampton and Glasgow Universities, which, in collaboration with Historic Scotland and theatre professionals, staged productions of Sir David Lyndsay's Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis in Linlithgow Palace and Stiling Castle in June 2013.

He has supervised graduate students working on a range of topics at MA, MSc and PhD level, ranging from the dream-visions and romances of the Fourteenth Century to the drama of the late Sixteenth Century, and covering topics as diverse as the Shakespearean films of Sir Laurence Olivier and the representation of animals in late fourteenth century literature.

The Canterbury Tales

Shakespeare: Modes and Genres

Writing and Tyranny in the Age of Henry VIII

Reviewing Early Drama