John Rathmell held a senior position in the Faculty of English until his retirement in the early 2000s. With an expertise in English Renaissance poetry, he is the editor of The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke (1963).
An alumnus of Jesus College, he held the Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship at Harvard before returning to Cambridge in the 1960s. He is a former Director of Studies in English at Christ's.