Until his retirement in 2021 David Lucking was Full Professor of English at the University of Salento, where he was a member of the Department of Humanistic Studies.
His educational trajectory began with schooling in Montréal and Toronto, and included a two-year period at Bosphorus University (then Robert College) in Istanbul during which he majored in Comparative Literature. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Leeds, gaining a first class combined honours degree in English and Philosophy and winning the university's Crabtree Prize for academic excellence. Funded by a university studentship awarded on the basis of academic merit, he subsequently earned his PhD at the same institution, writing his doctoral dissertation on religious elements in the fiction of Joseph Conrad.
In the course of his career at the University of Salento he taught English literature at both basic and advanced degree levels, and for a number of years also taught at the ISUFI (“Istituto Superiore Universitario per la Formazione Interdisciplinare”). Among the specialized courses he taught were Shakespeare Studies, Modern English Literature, Canadian Literature in English, and English Language.
Although his research interests are fairly diversified, extending to Canadian and American as well as British literature, he has in recent years centred his research activities primarily on English Renaissance literature and on Shakespeare in particular. A theme that crops up with some regularity in his work is that of language in its relation to identity, an issue he has explored from various points of view and in relation to different authors. The role played by narrative in the constructive of personal and social realities has also been a recurrent concern in his work. He is the author of Shakespearean Perspectives (2017), Making Sense in Shakespeare (2012), The Shakespearean Name: Essays on “Romeo and Juliet”, “The Tempest”, and Other Plays (2007), The Serpent’s Part: Narrating the Self in Canadian Literature (2003), Ancestors and Gods: Margaret Laurence and the Dialectics of Identity (2002), Plays Upon the Word: Shakespeare’s Drama of Language (1997), Myth and Identity: Essays on Canadian Literature (1995), Beyond Innocence: Literary Transformations of the Fall (1991), and Conrad’s Mysteries: Variations on an Archetypal Theme (1986). He has published numerous articles in international peer-reviewed journals such as Essays in Criticism, English Studies, Cahiers Élisabéthains, The Upstart Crow, English, The University of Toronto Quarterly, Cambridge Quarterly, Durham University Journal, The Dalhousie Review, Early Modern Literary Studies, Renaissance Forum, Fictions, Skenè, Rhesis, Canadian Literature, and Studies in Canadian Literature, as well as in various Italian journals. A substantial number of his papers on Shakespeare have been reprinted in various venues, and others are available online.