Stephen Spiess

Academic Division: Arts & HumanitiesStephen Spiess is an assistant professor of literature at Babson College. He specializes in early modern English literature and culture, with particular investments in Shakespeare and the interrelations of sex, language, embodiment, and knowledge in the English Renaissance. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Shakespeare Survey, Renaissance Quarterly, The Review of English Studies, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, and Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and His World. He is presently completing a book manuscript entitled Shakespeare and the Making of English Whoredom (under contract at Oxford University Press), which examines the immense cultural labor necessary to produce and sustain the fiction of the “whore” as a fixed, stable, and legible object of knowledge in early modern England. Stephen completed his Ph.D. in English Language & Literature at University of Michigan (2013), where he also received a graduate certificate in Women''s Studies. For his work in the classroom, he was awarded the David & Linda Moscow Prize for Excellence in Teaching English Composition (2010). Before joining the Babson faculty in 2017, he taught at Stanford University.

Academic Degrees

• Ph D, University of Michigan
• MA, University of Michigan
• MA, Dartmouth College
• BA, Brown University

Academic Interests

Early Modern English Language, Literature, & Culture; Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, including Shakespeare; Theories of Embodiment; Cultural Materialism; Feminist Literary Criticism & Theory; History of Sexuality (including Queer Theory); English Lexical Culture (Philology, Lexicography, Keywords)

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Awards & Honors

2016 - Research Associate, Forms of Conversion: Religion, Culture, and Cognitive Ecologies in Early Modern Europe and its Worlds , SSHRC Research Grant

2016 - Research Seminarian, Theatre and Conversion in Early Modern Europe, McGill University

2014 - Honourable Mention, J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize, Shakespeare Association of America

2013 - Clarence D. Thorpe Dissertation Prize, English Department, University of Michigan

2012 - Robyn A. Thevenet Fellowship, Women’s Studies Department, University of Michigan

2012 - Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship, University of Michigan

2012 - Research Grant for Scholarship Focusing on Women and Gender, Institute for the Research of Women and Gender, University of Michigan

2010 - David & Linda Moscow Prize for Excellence in Teaching English Composition, English Department Writing Program, University of Michigan

2010 - Community of Scholars, Institute for the Research of Women and Gender, University of Michigan

2010 - Graduate Mentor Fellowship, English Department Writing Program, University of Michigan

1999 - Rose Writing Fellowship, Brown University