Lorna Hutson

Biography

Lorna Hutson was educated in San Francisco and Edinburgh. She gained a Clothworkers' Exhibition to read English at Oxford, receiving first-class M.A. honors in 1979, and her D.Phil. in 1983. After a research fellowship at Victoria University, New Zealand, Lorna was Lecturer and then Reader in Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary College, London until 1998. She was then Full Professor at the University of California at Berkeley for four years before coming to St Andrews as the Berry Professor of English Literature in 2004. Lorna has held fellowships from the Folger, the Huntington Library and the Guggenheim, and is a corresponding editor of the journal Representations.

Research Interest

Lorna's interests are in the rhetorical bases of Renaissance literature, and in the relationship between literary form and the formal aspects of non-literary culture. Recent work includes the delivery of the Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures, 2012, on ‘Circumstantial Shakespeare’, the editing of Ben Jonson’s Discoveries (1641) for the Cambridge Complete Works of Ben Jonson (2012) and The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (OUP, 2007, pbk 2011), which won the Roland Bainton Prize for Literature in 2008. Lorna has also worked on Ben Jonson, on early modern women's writing, on the history of sexuality, on friendship, feminism, rhetoric, law and on usury.