Rate My Professor Mark Rankin

Mark Rankin is Professor of English and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society at James Madison University, where he has been on the faculty since 2007, progressing from Assistant Professor (2007-2013) to Associate Professor (2013-2017), Professor (2019-present), and holding the Roop Distinguished Professorship (2017-2020). He earned a Ph.D. in English Literature from The Ohio State University in 2007 with a Certificate in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and a dissertation titled “Imagining Henry VIII: Cultural Memory and the Tudor King, 1535-1625,” an M.A. in English Literature from Ohio University in 2001, and a B.S.Ed. summa cum laude in English and Mathematics Education from Ohio University in 1999.

Specializing in Tudor literature, English Reformation literature and culture, and the early English Bible, particularly the history of the book during the English Renaissance and Reformation, Rankin has co-edited Henry VIII and His Afterlives: Literature, Politics, and Art (Cambridge University Press, 2009; digital reissue 2012) and The Elizabethan Catholic Underground: Clandestine Printing and Scribal Subversion in the English Counter-Reformation (Brill, 2025), and contributed as editor to Section III: Marian Sermons in Sermons at Paul's Cross, 1521-1642 (Oxford University Press, 2017). Ongoing projects include editions of William Tyndale’s The Practyse of Prelates (Catholic University of America Press), the Bale-Cancellar controversy (Renaissance English Text Society), and studies on Thomas More’s English Works and John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. With thirty-five peer-reviewed publications in journals such as Renaissance Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, and The Sixteenth Century Journal, he edits Reformation, serves on the Renaissance Studies editorial board, and sits on the Renaissance English Text Society council. Rankin has secured over $1 million in external funding, including as Principal Investigator for an NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant on The Independent Works of William Tyndale ($349,274, 2016-2019), and has directed or co-directed four NEH Summer Seminars on Reformation printing. Fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare, Huntington, and Newberry Libraries, along with awards like the Provost Award for Excellence in Research (2021) and Edna T. Shaeffer Humanist Award (2014), underscore his contributions. He presents regularly at Renaissance Society of America and Sixteenth Century Studies Conference meetings and served as Faculty Member in Residence for JMU’s Semester in London (2013, 2024).