Margreta de Grazia received her PhD in English from Princeton with a specialization in Renaissance literature. Her first book Shakespeare Verbatim (Oxford, 1991) traces the emergence of Shakespeare as a modern author from late eighteenth-century editorial imperatives. Her recent book, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge, 2007), demonstrates how the modern tradition of psychologizing Hamlet has effaced both the play's and the protagonist's preoccupation with land and entitlement.

She has also co co-edited Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge, 1996) with Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass and the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2001) with Stanley Wells. Her interests at present include Shakespeare as an historical and cultural phenomenon, early modern notions of subjectivity and authorship, the production and ownership of early modern texts, and the periodizing of literary history, poetics, and rhetoric.

She has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, and the Guggenheim Foundation and presently holds the Sheli Z. and Burton X. Rosenberg Professor of Humanities.

Currently she is working on a book entitled Five Period Pieces from the English Renaissance, analyzing forms of organizing time in the long sixteenth century that have eluded modern and postmodern periodizing schemes.