Dr. Quilligan is a specialist in the study of women and literature of the Renaissance. She received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and her Ph.D. from Harvard. She is the author of The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre; Milton's Spenser: The Politics of Reading; and The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan's Cite des Dames. She has also coedited two volumes of essays (Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe and Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture), and is at work on three booklength projects: female political authority in the sixteenth century, incest and female agency, and slavery in the Renaissance epic.