Lori Anne Ferrell

Lori Anne Ferrell is Dean of the School of Arts & Humanities at Claremont Graduate University (CGU), where she also directs the Early Modern Studies program and the Kingsley & Kate Tufts Poetry Awards. She holds a PhD in History from Yale University and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Her research focuses on the impact of religious and political change on early modern texts—literary, theological, and practical—during the century preceding the English Civil War. Her expertise spans English Renaissance and Reformation literature, early modern British and European history, the Bible in English-language culture, and Shakespeare studies. She teaches courses including the Shakespeare Seminar, studies on Sidney, Spenser, Donne, and Milton, early modern theater, book history, the English Bible, and Tudor-Stuart history.

Her recent and ongoing scholarly projects include editing Volume 11 of The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne (Oxford University Press, 2016), a co-authored monograph on Shakespeare and religious toleration, and a study on the Victorian archiving of 16th-century religious texts. Her work has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Humanities Research Council (UK).

Notable publications include:

• Government By Polemic: James I, the King’s Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603–1625 (Stanford, 1998)
• The Bible and the People (Yale, 2008)
• Co-edited Religion and Society in Early Modern England (Routledge, 2005)
• Co-edited The English Sermon Revised (Manchester, 2000)

She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, reflecting her significant contributions to historical scholarship.

Ferrell advises students in the Early Modern Studies concentration and has collaborated across disciplines, including with botanist Lucinda McDade on Shakespeare and botany. Her editorial and research work is deeply collaborative and often funded by major national and international research bodies. She has held residential fellowships at All Souls College, Oxford, and Pembroke College, Cambridge.

She is actively involved in transdisciplinary initiatives at CGU and continues to shape scholarship in early modern studies through leadership, publication, and mentorship.