English Speakers

Dr Leo Mellor

Dr Leo Mellor is the Roma Gill Fellow in English at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge and teaches twentieth-century literature. His first monograph is Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture (2011). Dr Mellor's own poetry includes Things Settle, Ground Detail (with Alistair Noon) and Maps to Sound. In 2006 he was awarded the Harper-Wood prize for poetry and travelled among the Welsh speaking communities in Patagonia, South America.

Dr Gavin Alexander

Dr Gavin Alexander is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ's College. His books include Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586-1640 (Oxford, 2006) and a Penguin Classics edition of  Sidney's 'The Defence of Poesy' and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism  (2004). Dr Alexander's current project is an edition of a recently discovered manuscript treatise on poetics written in 1599. His teaching spans classical drama, renaissance literature, literary theory, versification, and literature and music.

Dr Sophie Read

Dr Sophie Read is a faculty lecturer in English and a fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge. Her teaching interests range from the Renaissance to (and occasionally past) the eighteenth century, though her research is mainly confined to the earlier period. Dr Read is currently finishing a book entitled Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England. Her other interests are golden age detective fiction, some contemporary poetry, scent, and writing about food.

Dr Daniel Wakelin

Dr Daniel Wakelin is Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Palaeography at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Hilda's College. He attended Ixworth Middle School, where his father is caretaker, and Thurston Community College, both in Suffolk. Dr Wakelin then studied and taught English at the University of Cambridge for several years, before moving recently to Oxford. His research concerns the original manuscripts, scribes and readers of medieval English literature, especially from the age of Chaucer to the early Tudor period. Dr Wakelin has published Humanism, Reading, & English Literature 1430-1530 (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Professor Helen Cooper

Professor Helen Cooper has been Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge since 2004, in the Chair originally founded for C.S. Lewis. Professor Cooper’s books include The Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance, and The English Romance in Time. She currently organises the University of Cambridge’s English activities at The Prince's Teaching Institute Summer Schools.

Dr Fred Parker

Dr Fred Parker is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge and Fellow and Director of Studies at Clare College. His teaching interests range widely, with an emphasis on English literature from Milton to Byron, tragedy, and relations between literature and philosophy. Dr Parker's books include Scepticism and Literature (OUP, 2003) and, most recently, The Devil as Muse: Blake, Byron and the Adversary (2011), which considers the figure of the Devil in relation to artistic creativity.