| Dr Peter McCullough |
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English
Tel: 01865 287334
 Academic Profile I joined Lincoln in 1997 to teach English literature in the period 1509 - 1740: that is, the portion of the English syllabus which falls between the medieval period taught (from Michaelmas 2007) by my colleague, Dr. Winfried Rudolf, and the Romantic and later periods taught by Lincoln’s Head of English, Prof. Stephen Gill.
My arrival at Lincoln marks the end of a steady eastward progress. Born and raised in northern California, I took my first degree in 1987 at the University of California Los Angeles ("UCLA"), followed by a Ph.D. (1992) and two years of post-doctoral teaching at Princeton University. From 1994-97 I was a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Oxford, where I was first introduced to the Oxford English course and taught the same papers that I now teach at Lincoln in a combination of classes and tutorials:
English Literature from 1509 - 1642 English Literature from 1642 - 1740 Shakespeare I also offer tuition to undergraduates from Lincoln and other colleges for special subjects including Milton, Marvell, Dryden, and Renaissance and eighteenth-century prose and poetry. As a University Lecturer I offer lecture courses in English Faculty. These reflect my research as well as authors and topics of more general interest in the early modern period: Religion and Literature,1540-1640 Andrew Marvell’s Poetry John Donne the Preacher John Dryden’s Poetry. I also supervise post-graduate research students whose projects focus on the non- dramatic (and especially the religious) literature of the late Tudor and early Stuart period (1559-1642). Dissertations I have directed include Erica Longfellow, published as Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2004); Beatrice Groves, published as Texts and Traditions: Religion and Shakespeare, 1592-1604 (Oxford, 2007); and Emma Rhatigan, ‘John Donne’s Lincoln’s Inn Sermons’ (D.Phil. 2006; forthcoming, Oxford). I also contribute modules on biographical research methods and on textual editing for the M.St. in Early Modern Literature.
Research InterestsMy research focuses on the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline periods of English literary history (1558-1649). I am convinced that all art, including literature, is best understood in terms of the historical context that produced it, and my research, like my teaching, would be broadly described as "historical". But I also believe that studying historical context should not overtake or obscure our appreciation of the formal and aesthetic qualities of literature. To that end, my work seeks to reconstruct the cultural contexts that produced literature in Renaissance England as a way to understand better its artistic forms. I have been particularly interested in the way that religion, both in its political and doctrinal aspects, contributed to England’s literary Renaissance. My research focus on the important early modern genre of the sermon, with a particular interest in the life and works of Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) and John Donne (1572-1631). My selected edition of Andrewes’s sermons and lectures presents works by this author for the first time with full critical apparatus. I am now at work on a new full-scale biography of Andrewes. In 2006 I was appointed by Oxford University Press as the General Editor of The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, a completely new, and (for the first time) fully annotated edition, in 16 projected volumes, of the 160 sermons written by Donne. I am also co-editing, with Hugh Adlington and Emma Rhatigan, The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, which will gather essays by over thirty contributors to survey for students and scholars the complexities and richnesses (literary, historical, and theological) of preaching in the British Isles, 1500 – 1740. I also have a strong interest in book history, in particular the ways that religion influenced the book trade before the Civil War.
Publications
‘Donne as Preacher’, in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, ed. Achsah Guibbory (Cambridge University Press, 2006) ed., Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons and Lectures (Oxford University Press, 2005). ed., with Lori Anne Ferrell, The English Sermon Revised: New Studies in Early Modern Preaching (Manchester University Press, 2000). Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge University Press, 1998). ‘Out of Egypt: Richard Fletcher’s Sermon before Elizabeth I on the Execution of Mary Queen of Scots’, in Julia Walker, ed., Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana (Duke University Press, 1998). ‘Making Dead Men Speak: Laudianism, Print, and the Works of Lancelot Andrewes, 1626-1642’, Historical Journal 41(1998). ‘Lancelot Andrewes and Language’, Anglican Theological Review 74 (1992). Numerous entries for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Work in Progress
Gen. ed., The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, 16 vols. (Oxford University Press). ed., with Hugh Adlington and Emma Rhatigan, The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford University Press). Lancelot Andrewes: A Life (for the Oxford University Press). ‘Printers, Prelates, and Princes: the House of Richard Badger, Master Printer, 1629-1641’
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