Lorna Hutson

Lorna Margaret Hutson, FBA (born 27 November 1958) is the ninth Merton Professor of English Literature and a fellow of Merton College, Oxford. Together with Professor John Hudson, she is a director of the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Law and Literature at the University of St Andrews.

Life and career Hutson was born in Berlin on 27 November 1958, to John Whiteford Hutson, a British career diplomat, and his wife, Doris Kemp. She attended St Hilary's School, Edinburgh and Tormead School, Guildford. She studied at Somerville College, Oxford graduating with an MA (Hons) with first class honours, and received a DPhil in 1983. In 2012 Hutson was Dr Alice Griffin Fellow in Shakespearean Studies at the University of Auckland; she also gave the Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures, on the subject of "Circumstantial Shakespeare"; the lectures were published by Oxford University Press under the same title in 2015.

In 2016 she was elected as a fellow of the British Academy, in May gave the British Academy's Shakespeare Lecture, and in September took up the post of Merton Professor of English Literature, becoming a fellow of Merton College, Oxford.

Hutson is an honorary fellow of Somerville College. She was elected a fellow of the English Association in 2024.

Publications Thomas Nashe in Context (1989) The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (1994) Feminism and Renaissance Studies (editor, 1999) Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe (co-editor, 2001) The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (2007) Circumstantial Shakespeare (2015) England's Insular Imagining: the Elizabethan Erasure of Scotland (2023) ISBN 9781009253574