Stephen Spiess

Stephen Spiess is Associate Professor of Early Modern Literature & Cultural Studies and Peter Black Research Scholar at Babson College. He joined the Babson faculty in 2017, following three years as a Thinking Matters Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. 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 first book, Shakespeare and the Making of English Whoredom (Oxford University Press, 2026), examines the extraordinary cultural labor necessary to produce and sustain the fiction of the “whore” as a fixed, coherent, and readily apprehensible category of sexual knowledge in early modern England. This work, he shows, unfolds across a variety of historically situated social, textual, and linguistic processes, from the writing of dictionary entries, character sketches, and lyric poems to public proclamations, conversion rituals, and dramatic representations. It also extends into the present era, where scholars continue to shore up whoredom's incoherences and to reproduce moralized distinctions between “real” prostitutes and “discursive” whores. Charting a different approach in this book, he argues that the ambiguities, incoherences, and impasses that attend the meanings and makings of English whoredom are essential to understanding how that category operates, both in that historical culture and our own. Establishing whoredom as a knowledge relation and a material process, he reveals the analytical benefits of lingering in sites where sexual knowledge breaks down, and of tarrying with the complexities and consequences of the material practices, cultural logics, and social affects that emerge to mediate these impasses.

With Marjorie Rubright, Prof. Spiess co-edited Logomotives: Words that Change the World, 1400-1700 (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) a collection of twenty-six original essays on the conversional potential of language and the world-changing capacity of words. Additional essays on these and related issues have appeared in Modern Philology, Shakespeare Survey, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, and Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and His World. He is currently at work on several new projects, including an edited collection, Shakespeare and the Textual Gloss; a public-facing lecture series, Shakespeare in a Word; and a second monograph, Renaissance Undoing: Philology, Epistemology, Play, that will draw on materials introduced in those lectures and elsewhere.

Prof. Spiess received his Ph.D. in English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan, where he also received a David & Linda Moscow Prize for Excellence in Teaching English Composition. At Babson, he has been honored with a Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence in Undergraduate Education (2021); a Babson Pride Award for significant contributions to the college’s LGBTQ+ community (2024); and a Faculty Research Award for Innovative Scholarship (2026). Since 2025, he has co-chaired the Shakespeare Studies seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University.