Colin Burrow author page

Colin Burrow biography

Colin Burrow is a scholar of early modern and Renaissance literature, particularly noted for work on classical reception and literary imitation. He currently serves as Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford.

Burrow’s academic trajectory includes undergraduate study at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, followed by doctoral work at New College, Oxford. His doctoral thesis addressed the period 1580–1614, and he began as a research fellow at Caius in 1987. He later held lecturing and professorial posts in Cambridge before moving to Oxford.

His editions include Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems (Oxford Shakespeare) and the complete non-dramatic poems of Ben Jonson (Cambridge). He has also edited and published Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (2013) and Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity (2019).

In 2020, Burrow was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He has served as co-editor of the Review of English Studies, and contributes frequently to the London Review of Books, where his essays cover topics from classical texts to modern fiction.

He has also written biographies for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and acts as an advisor to the Oxford English Dictionary on Elizabethan English.

Recent publication: Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity (2019).