Katharine Cleland

Katharine Cleland is an associate professor in the Department of English. She is also the Director of the M.A. in English program and the Director of Graduate Studies. Her research specialty is early modern English literature, including Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, and the history/culture of the English Reformation. Secondary research interests include adaptation studies and gender and sexuality studies. Her monograph, Irregular Unions: Clandestine Marriage in Early Modern English Literature (Cornell UP, 2021), constitutes the first literary history of clandestine marriage in early modern England. Individual chapters examine the religious, political, and social discourses surrounding clandestine marriage in works ranging from Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Othello. Her work also appears in Studies in Philology, Spenser Studies, Violent Masculinities: Male Aggression in Early Modern Texts, and the Oxford History of Poetry in English. Dr. Cleland received a Certificate of Teaching Excellence from Virginia Tech’s College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences in 2021.