Regius Chair: Greg Walker

Greg Walker has been appointed the Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature.

Formerly, Professor Walker was the University’s Masson Professor of English Literature, a position he has held since 2007.

Professor Walker gained his first degree in English and History and subsequent PhD at the University of Southampton.

He held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Southampton, and lectureships at the universities of Queensland, Buckingham and Leicester before coming to Edinburgh.

His research is primarily focused on the literary, dramatic and political history of the medieval period and the 16th century, although he has also published on popular music and the films of Alexander Korda.

He is interested in the history of the stage in the period before the building of the professional playhouses, and in the cultural consequences of the Henrician Reformation.

Professor Walker’s first book ‘John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s’ (Cambridge, 1988) was a study of the early Tudor poet John Skelton, and he has maintained a strong interest in, and affection for, England’s most belligerent Poet Laureate ever since.

He has also published widely on early drama.

He is also Co-Editor, with Professor Elaine Treharne of Florida State University of Oxford University Press’s ‘Oxford Literary Topics’ series.

Professor Walker is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the English Association, a member of the Executive of the Council for College and University English and of the RAE 2008 and Research Excellence Framework Impact pilot panels for English.