John Kerrigan (literary scholar)

John Kerrigan,FBA(born 1956) is a British literary scholar, with interests including the works ofShakespeare,Wordsworthand modern poetry since Emily Dickinson and Hopkins, along with Irish studies.

Kerrigan was born in Liverpool; he was educated there atSt. Edward's Collegefollowed by Oxford, where he went toKeble,later becoming a Junior Research Fellow atMerton.

Since 1982 he has taught at Cambridge where he is a fellow ofSt. John's College.Between 2001 and 2023 he was Professor of English 2000 in theFaculty of English,University of Cambridge.

He has lectured extensively in Europe, North and South America, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, and his publications are internationally acclaimed. In 2013 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Visiting positions include UCLA,Aucklandand Princeton.

During the 1980s Kerrigan established himself as one of a group of scholars who revolutionised the editing of Shakespeare by discrediting the practice of 'conflating' variant early texts of such plays asHamletandKing Lear,though his position, like that of others, has become more complicated over time. His own editions includeLove's Labour's Lost(1982) and Shakespeare'sSonnets and A Lover's Complaint(1986). He did further work onA Lover's Complaintrecovering its sources and analogues inMotives of Woe(1991). His recent Shakespearean output includes essays on 'The Phoenix and Turtle' (2013), an extensive analysis of the question 'How Celtic was Shakespeare?', andShakespeare's Binding Language(2016).His 2016 Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures were published in 2018 asShakespeare's Originality.

He won theTruman Capote Award for Literary Criticismin 1998 forRevenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon,an ambitious study in comparative literature, and in 2001 published a book of essaysOn Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature.

HisArchipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603-1707(2008) seeks to correct the traditional Anglocentric account of seventeenth-century English Literature by showing how much remarkable writing was produced in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and how preoccupied such English authors as Shakespeare, Milton, and Marvell were with the often fraught interactions between ethnic, religious, and national groups around Britain and Ireland.

Over the last couple of decades John Kerrigan has published numerous essays on modern poetry, includingLouis MacNeice,Seamus Heaney,Roy Fisher,Geoffrey Hill,Denise Riley,Eiléan Ní ChuilleanáinandPaul Muldoon.Among the topics he has recently addressed are poetry and the migrant crisisand environmentalism.

He has written extensively for theTimes Literary Supplement(London) and theLondon Review of Books.

Works

• Ed., William Shakespeare,Love's Labour's Lost(1982)
• Ed., William Shakespeare,The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint(1986)
• Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and Female Complaint(1991)
• Ed., with Michael Cordner and Peter Holland,English Comedy(1994)
• Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon(1996)
• Ed., with Peter Robinson,The Thing about Roy Fisher(2000)
• On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature: Essays(2001)
• Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics, 1603-1707(2008)
• Shakespeare's Binding Language(2016)
• Shakespeare's Originality(2018)

External links

• UIOWA Truman Capote Prize Report
• Cambridge English Faculty website