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Margreta de Grazia

Emerita Sheli Z. and Burton X. Rosenberg Professor of the Humanities

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 second book, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge, 2007), awarded both the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize and the Elizabeth Dietz Award, demonstrates how the modern tradition of psychologizing Hamlet has effaced both the play's and the protagonist's preoccupation with land and entitlement. Four Shakespearean Period Pieces (Chicago, 2021) calls for the reappraisal of four key concepts that have served to situate Shakespeare in history: chronology, periodization, secularization, and anachronism.  Her most recent book, Shakespeare Without a Life (forthcoming, Oxford, 2022) asks what difference a biography makes to the study of Shakespeare by looking at the two centuries in which his works circulated without one.

 She has also co-edited Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge, 1996) with Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass and both the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2001) and the New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (2010)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 chronologizing, periodizing, and secularizing of Shakespeare. 

She has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, and the Guggenheim Foundation and is presently the Emerita Sheli Z. and Burton X. Rosenberg Professor of the Humanities. In 2005 she received the Ira H. Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching and in 2010, the Provost’s Award for Distinguished Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring.

Publications

Doctoral Dissertations Chaired

2015

Bronwyn V. Wallace "Intimate Exegesis: Reading and Feeling in Early Modern Devotional Literature"

2014

Jessica Rosenberg "Bound flowers, loose leaves Horticultural form and textual practice in early modern English print"

2011

Thomas Ward "Inside Voices of the English Renaissance"

2010

Stephanie Elsky "Time Out of Mind: The Poetics of Custom and Common Law in Early Modern England"

2008

Catherine Nicholson "Geographies of English Eloquence"

2007

Kurt Schreyer "Period Pieces: Remnants of Mystery Drama in Shakespeare"

2006

Cyrus Mulready "Romancing the Globe: Romance, English Expansion and the Early Modern Stage"

2005

Marissa Greenberg "Tortured Mimesis: Representing Punishment in Early Modern London"
Miriam Jacobson "'Strangely Entangled': Alternative Antiquities in Renaissance English Poetry"

2004

Tyler Smith "A Poetics of Indenture: 'Cases peculiar' in English Renaissance Literature"

2003

Toby Heman "Indoctrinating the Text: Reformation Controversies and Renaissance Texts, 1559-1640"

2000

Rayna Margrit Kalas "Frames, Glass, and the Technology of Poetic Invention"

1999

John Leonard Parker "God Among Thieves: Marx's Christological Theory of Value and the Literature of the English Reformation"

1996

Alison Chapman "Reforming Time: Calendars and Almanacs in Early Modern England"

1993

Max Thomas "The Practice of Poetry in Early Modern English"

1991

Jeff Masten "Textual Reproduction: Collaboration, Gender, and Authorship in Renaissance Drama"

Courses Taught

fall 2012

ENGL 735.401 Shakespeare and Secularity canceled  

spring 2012

ENGL 231.301 Renaissance Short Form  

fall 2011

ENGL 020.301 Literature Before 1660  
ENGL 032.001 Renaissance Poetics  

fall 2010

ENGL 032.001 Renaissance Poetics  

fall 2009

ENGL 226.301 Ovid and Shakespeare  
ENGL 332.301 Renaissance Poetry  

spring 2009

ENGL 226.401 Ovid and Shakespeare  

fall 2008

ENGL 032.001 Renaissance Poetry  
ENGL 232.301 Shakespeare and Marlowe  

spring 2008

ENGL 231.301 Shakespeare's Poems & Plays  

spring 2007

fall 2006

ENGL 731.301 Renaissance Studies  

spring 2006

ENGL 101.001 Shakespeare  
ENGL 801.301 Pedagogy  

fall 2005

ENGL 020.001 Literature Before 1660  
ENGL 735.301 Shakespeare  

spring 2004

ENGL 101.001 Shakespeare  
ENGL 801.301 Pedagogy  

fall 2003

ENGL 335.301 Intro to Shakespeare  

spring 2003

ENGL 531.401 Renaissance Gothic  
ENGL 543.401 Renaissance Gothic  

fall 2002

ENGL 101.001 Shakespeare  

spring 2002

ENGL 101.001 Shakespeare  

spring 2001

ENGL 101.001 Shakespeare  

fall 1999

ENGL 038.001 Milton  

spring 1999

ENGL 101.001 Shakespeare  
ENGL 299.311 Shakespeare and Film  

fall 1998

ENGL 037.001 Shakespeare Tragedies  

spring 1998

fall 1997

ENGL 101.001 Shakespeare  
ENGL 235.301 Topics in Shakespeare  

spring 1997

ENGL 101.001 Shakespeare  

fall 1996

ENGL 201.303 Major British Writers  
ENGL 235.301 Topics in Shakespeare