David Womersley

David Womersley is a British literary scholar and intellectual historian specialising in the long eighteenth century, with particular expertise in Edward Gibbon, historical writing and the relationship between literature and political thought. He is Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow of St Catherine’s College. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, he subsequently held posts at Pembroke College, Cambridge, the University of Leeds and Jesus College, Oxford before taking up the Warton chair in 2002. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society. His research ranges from Elizabethan historical drama to eighteenth-century historiography, political literature, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson and changing European ideas about civilisation and barbarism.

Womersley is particularly closely associated with the historian Edward Gibbon. His books include The Transformation of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Gibbon and the ‘Watchmen of the Holy City’: The Historian and His Reputation, 1776–1814, and he edited the widely used Penguin edition of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His Divinity and State examines religion, politics and the writing of history in sixteenth-century England, while his editorial scholarship includes major editions of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and selections from Samuel Johnson. Womersley’s work is especially valuable for understanding how historians and literary writers interpreted the past and used Roman, religious and constitutional history to address the political controversies of their own periods.