Professor Peter McCullough
Professor Peter McCullough
- Sohmer Fellow in English Renaissance Literature
- Garden Master
- Anti-Racism Advocate
Profile
I was educated in the California state system, including for my first degree (BA) in English from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). After my doctorate at Princeton University, I came to Oxford as a post-doctoral Junior Research Fellow in English at Trinity College. I have been Fellow in English at Lincoln, with a joint-appointment in the Oxford English Faculty, since 1997.
College teaching
I teach the core papers covering the long ‘early modern’ period of English literature: 1550 – 1660, 1660 – 1760, and Shakespeare. In addition, I supervise final-year independent theses on topics within that chronological range. In all of my teaching I encourage the interpretation of the formal, artistic aspects of literature through careful attention to historical contexts such as language, rhetoric, politics, and religion.
- Research
Like my teaching, my research approaches early modern literature through its historical contexts. I am particularly interested in the influence on literature of religious change in the period following the Reformation. I am a leading expert on the sermons and other religious writing of John Donne and Lancelot Andrewes, and on the biography and social history of religious authors and institutions in their period.
- Select publications
General Editor, The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, 16 vols. (2015 - ).
‘"Avant-Garde Conformity" in the 1590s’, in Anthony Milton, ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Vol. I: Reformation and Identity c. 1520-1662 (2017)
‘Music Reconciled to Preaching’, in Alec Ryrie and Natalie Mears, eds., Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain (2012)
Editor, Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons and Lectures (2005)
Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (1998)