Tess Grogan

Tess Grogan received her doctorate in English from Yale University and her bachelor's in English and government from Smith College. She was awarded a 2015 Marshall Scholarship, which supported a master's in Renaissance Literary Culture from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She specializes in early modern literature with an emphasis on romance and epic, masculine performance, and the politics of chivalric revival. Her current project, The Old Lie: Rhetorics of Heroism in Early Modern England, traces the Elizabethan government's recruitment of soldiers using heroic fictions of meritocracy during the late sixteenth century. In addition to offering courses on canonical premodern authors—Milton, Feminist Shakespeare, The English Literary Tradition I—she also teaches courses on Ursula K. Le Guin, science fiction, wilderness literature, and the chivalric tradition (Playing Knights: Chivalry, Fantasy, Romance). Her work on race, monuments, and mourning in the Faerie Queene and pedagogy in the Shakespeare classroom has been published in Spenser Studies and Studies in English Literature 1500-1900. Before joining the department at Smith, she taught literature and writing courses at Yale, with the Warrior-Scholar Project for US servicemembers and veterans, and through the Yale-University of New Haven Prison Education Initiative for incarcerated college students.

Selected Publications

“Appropriate Shakespeare: The Bard, the World, and ‘I,’” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 62.1 (2022) (Special Issue: World, Globe, Planet)

“‘Gather Up the Reliques of Thy Race’: Paynim Remains in Faeryland,” Spenser Studies 35 (2021): 153-179 (Special Issue: Spenser and Race)

“Speculative Bill,” Spenser Studies 34 (2020): 215-225