Jeffrey Masten

Masten earned a B.A. in English literature and music at Denison University in 1986.[2] He received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania in 1991, with a Ph.D. dissertation under the direction of Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass.[3] At Pennsylvania, he was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities.[2] He began his teaching career in the English Department at Harvard University, where he was Gardner Cowles Associate Professor in the Humanities.[4] At Harvard, Masten was executive secretary and a board member of the English Institute.[5] He became an Associate Professor of English at Northwestern University in 1998 and is currently Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northwestern.[2] He has also taught at the Folger Institute of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.[6] Masten was Director of Northwestern's Gender Studies Program from 2005-2008.[7]

Masten's published books and articles include influential and "controversial" writing on Renaissance dramatic collaboration and authorship by Shakespeare and his contemporaries,[8] as well as on the early history of sexuality. In 2012 Masten discovered a previously unknown first-edition copy of Christopher Marlowe's 1594 play Edward II, only the second existing copy of the play.[9][2] He has written influentially on early women's writing in English[10] and on the language of sexuality in early English history.[11] His selected publications include:

• Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge University Press, 1997)
• Editor, with Peter Stallybrass and Nancy J. Vickers, Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production (Routledge, 1997)
• Editor, An/The Old Law, by Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, et al., in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, and Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works, gen. ed. Gary Taylor et al. (Oxford University Press, 2007)
• "Bound for Germany: Heresy, sodomy, and a new copy of Marlowe's Edward II". Times Literary Supplement. pp. 17–19.
• Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare's Time (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Winner of the 2018 Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Prize for best book in Tudor and Stuart drama.[12]

Since 1997 Masten has been a co-editor of the scholarly journal Renaissance Drama.[13]

Masten is the recipient of fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, Newberry Library, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (2017).[14] Masten is the recipient of Denison University's Alumni Citation award (2017).[2]

At Northwestern, Masten was awarded the E. LeRoy Hall Award for Distinguished Teaching in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences (2002–03),[15] named Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence in 2006,[16] and named Herman and Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professor in Literature in 2009.[17]

In Shakespeare studies, Masten served as a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America (2001–03),[18] chairperson of the Modern Language Association (MLA) Division on Shakespeare, and member of the MLA Committee on the New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare.[19]

Masten was a member of the Denison University board of trustees from 2010-16[2] and was reappointed to the board in 2017.[20]

• Masten's Northwestern English Department webpage
• MLA Commons webpage