Dr John Colley

I work on early modern literature, especially drama, and especially early modern university drama. This corpus encompasses the circa 120 plays that were written by and for students and academics in Oxford and Cambridge c.1540–1640. I am also interested in the impact of university drama on the broader literary culture of the day, as represented for instance in the works of Thomas Nashe. In 2026 I developed my research on university drama by collaborating with Shakespeare’s Globe for a public ‘Research in Action’ event. A forthcoming article in Renaissance Quarterly brings Ben Jonson’s Epicoene (1610) into conversation with a Cambridge comedy, Loyola (1616), penned by the future bishop John Hacket.

My earlier research has focused on classical reception in late medieval and Renaissance literature. My first monograph, Humanism, English Literature, and the Translation of Greek, 1430–1560 (OUP, 2025), which was shortlisted for the Society for Renaissance Studies Biennial Book Prize 2026, pushed classical reception scholarship in more formally and generically diverse directions. It argued that late medieval and early Tudor English writers experienced a contradictory relationship to Greek: intense desire for the language and what it stood for was undercut partly by its frequent mediation via Latin and other vernaculars, and partly by the religious divisions that it came to reflect and magnify. You can see me talk about the book here.

My second book was The Coniuracion of Lucius Sergius Catelina: An Early Tudor Translation of Sallust’s ‘Bellum Catilinae’, EETS os 366 (OUP, 2025). This is a critical edition of the first ever translation of a Roman history into English. It demonstrated that more carefully historicized readings of Roman history took place earlier in England than scholars have previously claimed. I enjoy editing projects and working with manuscripts.

My work has variously been supported by grants and fellowships from Jesus College and Linacre College in Oxford, the AHRC, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the University of Glasgow Library, The Huntington Library, CRASSH (Cambridge's Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities), Cambridge Humanities Research Grants, and the British Academy.

Key books, articles, and book chapters (see also the Symplectic-linked publication list on the right):

• ‘Muteness and Mute Women in Early Modern Drama: Gender, Race, Disability, and the Classical Tradition’, Renaissance Quarterly 80.3 (forthcoming 2027)
• Humanism, English Literature, and the Translation of Greek, 1430–1560 (Oxford University Press, 2025) [*shortlisted for the Society for Renaissance Studies Biennial Book Prize 2026]
• The Coniuracion of Lucius Sergius Catelina: An Early Tudor Translation of Sallust’s ‘Bellum Catilinae’, EETS os 366 (Oxford University Press, 2025)
• ‘Philological Trifling? Avoiding Greek in Shakespeare’, in Imagining Antiquity in Shakespeare’s England, ed. Heather James and Andrew Wallace, Palgrave Shakespeare Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026), 111–31
• ‘“Maniacal Ciceronianism”? Costanzo Felici’s De coniuratione Catilinae and Historical Writing in the Early Cinquecento’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters 10 (2025), 115–44
• ‘A Lost Ballad Found: “A Lamentable Songe of the Daugtor of Iephtha” (ca. 1567–1568)’, Studies in Philology 122 (2025), 180–98
• ‘Diodorus Siculus in the English Quattrocento: New Light on the Source of Skelton’s Bibliotheca historica’, Medium Ævum 93 (2024), 389–407
• ‘“Et melles en semble”: Literariness and a Trilingual Recipe Collection from Late Medieval England’, in Recipes and Book Culture in England, 1350–1600, ed. Carrie Griffin and Hannah Ryley, Exeter Studies in Medieval Europe (Liverpool University Press, 2024), 237–53
• ‘Xenophon in English: The Sources of William Barker’s Education of Cyrus’, Notes and Queries 70 (2023), 146–51
• ‘Thomas Elyot and the Translation of Galen’, Review of English Studies 74 (2023), 619–34
• ‘Chaucer’s “Ebrayk Josephus” and The House of Fame’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 43 (2021), 45–74