James Simpson is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University (2004-). He was formerly Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. His books are Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text (London: Longman, 1995;  rev. ed. 2007); Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (2007); Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (2010); and Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism (2019). His textual interests range across late medieval and early modern Western European literature, theology, art, and politics, 1150-1690. The issues that engage him are the cultural disciplines of revolutionary evangelical modernity, and how we survived them.