Professor David Norbrook

Background

After school and university at Aberdeen, I studied for a D. Phil. at Balliol and then as a Prize Fellow at Magdalen. I was a Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen 1978-98, Professor of English at the University of Maryland 199-2002, Merton Professor of English Literature 2002-14. I was founding Director of the Oxford Centre for Early Modern Studies. I now live in Baltimore, USA, where my wife, Sharon Achinstein, teaches at Johns Hopkins University.

Teaching and Research

My tutorials and lectures included the period papers in English Literature 1509-1832, Shakespeare, Milton and Marvell. From the beginning a central interest has been the relations between literature, history and politics, with further interests in early modern women’s writing and in neo-Latin literature. I also work on Scottish poetry, especially Hugh MacDiarmid. I am currently completing an edition and a biography of the seventeenth-century woman writer Lucy Hutchinson.

Selected publications

• The Works of Lucy Hutchinson, vol. 2: Theological Writings and Translations, ed. Elizabeth Clarke, David Norbrook and Jane Stevenson (OUP, 2018); vol. 1: The Translation of Lucretius, ed. Reid Barbour and David Norbrook, with Latin text by Maria Cristina Zerbino (OUP, 2012).
• David Norbrook, Philip Hardie and Stephen Harrison (eds.), Lucretius and the Early Modern (OUP, 2016).
• Lucy Hutchinson’s ‘Order and Disorder’, ed. David Norbrook (Blackwell Publishers, 2001).
• Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660 (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
• The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse (with Henry Woudhuysen) (Allen Lane, 1992).
• Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984; revised edition, Oxford University Press, 2002).