Academic staff profiles
Greg Walker
Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature
+44 (0) 131 650 3049
6.18 David Hume Tower
Outline Biography
Greg 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 Historical Society, the English Association and the Society of Antiquaries, former Chair of the Council for College and University English, a member of the Council of the AHRC, 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. 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 and Reformation. In his spare time he is a passionate advocate of two potentially lost causes, Nottingham Forest Football Club and progressive rock music.
Research Interests
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 is currently 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, will stage productions of Sir David Lyndsay's Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis in Linlithgow Palace and Stiling Castle in June 2013.
He has supervised students 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. He is very happy to supervise postgraduate work in any or all of the following areas:
- Medieval and Tudor Drama: Textual and Performance History
- The Literature of the early Sixteenth Century: Skelton, Wyatt, Heywood, Bale, etc.
- The Henrician Reformation: Political and Literary Culture in the Reign of Henry VIII
- The Printed Book in the reign of Henry VIII
- Chaucer and the Literature of the late Fourteenth Century
- Romance, Gender and Genre in the Late Medieval period
- Comedy: Medieval to Modern
- The Films of Alexander Korda
- Popular Music and Literature
Publications
Publications list for Greg Walker
Teaching
The Canterbury Tales
Shakespeare: Modes and Genres
Writing and Tyranny in the Age of Henry VIII
Reviewing Early Drama
This article was published on Nov 26, 2012