Personal Chair: James Loxley

James Loxley has been made a Personal Chair in Early Modern Literature.

After completing a PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, Professor James Loxley held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Leeds for three years.

He followed this with a lectureship at Edinburgh in 1997. Since 2009, he has been Head of the University’s English Literature department, which this year celebrated its 250-year anniversary.

He has published widely on early modern poetry and drama, with a particular focus on Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, and the literature of the civil war period.

He has also published on the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and on issues in contemporary literary theory, especially the concept of performativity.

He recently led an AHRC-funded project researching the world-class collections of Shakespeare and early modern drama in Edinburgh libraries.

This work culminated in an exhibition, 'Beyond Macbeth', held at the National Library of Scotland.

In 2009 he discovered a manuscript of a hitherto unknown eyewitness account of Ben Jonson’s celebrated walk to Scotland in the summer of 1618.

He is now leading an AHRC-supported project to edit and annotate this text for publication in 2014.