Professor of Medieval & Renaissance Literature (1954)
Professor Bale’s research interests cover many aspects of medieval English language and literature, as well as translation and adaptation, creative non-fiction, travel writing, religious writing, the cultural history of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and manuscript studies. His work is concerned with the relationship between margins and peripheries in medieval culture, and with recovering neglected sources and voices from the medieval past. His most recent book, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: the World through Medieval Eyes, was published by Penguin in 2023. He currently holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to support his research on the Ottoman Siege of Rhodes (1480) and the development of late medieval news media. 

Professor of Digital Humanities
Professor Bassett’s research explores computational cultures with a focus on digital humanities, critical theory, automation fever, gender and technology, and histories and futures of technological forms of life. She has recently published work on histories of cyberculture and on AI and creativity. She is currently working on projects exploring AI and writing, with a focus on post-literature, and on a new book - ‘as we may now know’ -  investigating humans as thinking machines in new knowledge cultures. She is the Director of Cambridge Digital Humanities and collaborates with fellow researchers on projects developing critical approaches to new digital methods.

Professor of English (1966)
Professor Pettitt’s research is in the long nineteenth century. She is currently finishing a trilogy which investigates the concept of ‘seriality’ as it came to underpin social and political life in Europe and its colonies in ways that persist today. This research focuses on print culture alongside emerging digital technologies and media forms in the nineteenth century. She also works on the history of the material book and the historical production of ideas of authorship, ownership, originality and authority. Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity 1815-1848 won the NAVSA Book Prize, the ESPRit Prize, and the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize.

Professor in English (2001)
Professor Richards' expertise includes the history of reading, the history of rhetoric and the history of the book, all three approached through a focus on the physical voice. Books are not only objects held in the hand, to be read silently. They are alive with the voices of potential readers. This is especially true of books in the sixteenth-century - her period of specialism. Professor Richards is Chair of The English Association, and works closely with the Institute for English Studies, London, and University English, advocating for the subject and for the Arts and Humanities.

King Edward VII Professor of English Literature
Professor Wills' research interests include Irish literature and history; twentieth and twenty-first century poetry, fiction and memoir; gender and sexuality; migration; and embodiment. She maintains a strong interest in Irish literature and history, including research on Irish feminism and women's writing, the history of Ireland during the Second World War, and post-war Irish emigration to England. Recent work has looked at the cultural history of post-war immigration to Britain, and of psychiatric hospitals and carceral institutions in Britain and Ireland. Her most recent book, Missing Persons, or My Grandmother's Secrets, was published by Penguin in 2024 and was named Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards.