Jeffrey Masten

Jeffrey Masten works at the intersection of book history, sexuality studies, and early modern English literature. He has written influentially about collaboration, authorship, and discourses of sexuality in early drama in Textual Intercourse and about histories of sexual language in Queer Philologies, winner of the 2018 Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Award. Masten edited the collaborative tragicomedy The Old Law for Oxford’s Thomas Middleton: Collected Works and is completing an edition of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (Arden).

Masten has taught at Northwestern since 1998. Trained at Denison and Penn, he began his career at Harvard, where he was Gardner Cowles Associate Professor in the Humanities. At Northwestern, Masten has been named Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence, the university’s highest teaching award, and has directed the Gender & Sexuality Studies Program. His research has been supported by the Newberry and Folger Libraries and NEH. Masten serves on Denison’s Board of Trustees.

Based on provenance research for his Edward II edition, including his rediscovery of a rare first-edition copy bound with texts on heresy and Islam, Masten’s fellowship project follows the stories of early and later owner-annotators of the play to think about early modern female readers and queer readerships across time.