Stephen Spiess is 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. His current book project, Shakespeare and the Making of English Whoredom (under contract at Oxford University Press), 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. His new book project, tentatively entitled Becoming Undone in the English Renaissance: Disembodiment, Social Death, and Valuable Life, explores how, where, and in whom early moderns imagined life after conversion, abjection, or social death. Stephen completed his PhD in English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan (2013), where he also received the David & Linda Moscow Prize for Excellence in Teaching English Composition (2010).