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English Faculty

Tobias Gregory – Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies

Tobias Gregory

Tobias Gregory writes mainly about the literature, religion, and politics of early modern England, with a secondary interest in Italian literature. His articles and review essays on Milton, Spenser, Tasso, Empson, Ariosto, Browne, Herbert and others have appeared in ELH, Renaissance Quarterly, SEL, Milton Studies, Modern Philology, Huntington Library Quarterly, Journal of British Studies, Religion and Literature and the London Review of Books. Awards include fellowships from the ACLS, Huntington,and Folger, and the Isabel MacCaffrey Prize of the International Spenser Society.

Dr. Gregory's first book From Many Gods to One: Divine Action in Renaissance Epic (Chicago, 2006) examines how Renaissance poets approached the problem of epic divine action: how to replace the Olympian gods of Homer and Virgil? Drawing on scholarship in several disciplines--religion, classics, history, and philosophy, as well as literature--the book sheds new light on two subjects of enduring importance in Renaissance studies: the precarious balance between classical literary models and Christian religious norms, and the role of religion in drawing lines between allies and others.

Dr. Gregory’s current book project, Milton's Strenuous Liberty, tracks continuity and change over Milton’s career, and aims to discern amongst his shifting concerns which ones touched him most deeply. It argues that Milton on liberty should be understood rhetorically rather than systematically; for the importance of anticlericalism in Milton’s thought; for revised understandings of Milton on heresy, and of his politics in the late 1650s. Milton emerges in this study as an eloquent propagandist for unpopular positions, and as a poet who, in his late masterpieces, arrived at a broader perspective on the Puritan revolution he had supported without disavowing that lost cause.
 
Dr. Gregory supervises graduate student research in most areas of early modern literary studies. Recent graduate courses include Renaissance lyric, Milton, Renaissance epic, and literature and religion in early modern England. At the undergraduate level, his teaching interests include Shakespeare, Milton, Renaissance intellectual history, and epic poetry from Homer to the present. He is an associated faculty member in CUA's University Honors Program.

Curriculum vitae 

Research

Monograph 

 
Selected Articles
 
“Milton and Cromwell: Another Look at the Evidence.” Journal of British Studies 54.1 (2015) 44-62.
 
“Seventy-Eight Ways of Looking at John Milton.” Modern Philology 109.4 (2012) 544-62.
 
“By All Possible Art.” London Review of Books 36.26 (18 December
2014) 25-8.
 
“They Rudely Stare About.” London Review of Books 35.15 (4 July 2013) 24-6.
 
 
"Hero as Hero." London Review of Books 30.5 (6 March 2008).
 
"Tasso's God: Divine Action in Gerusalemme liberata." Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002) 559-595.
 

 

Contact

Office: 123 Marist Annex 
The Catholic University of America
620 Michigan Ave.
Washington, D.C. 20064

Phone: 202-319-5688

E-mail: gregoryt@cua.edu

 

Courses

  • HSHU 203 – Age of Discovery
  • ENG 364 – Milton
  • ENG 462 – Shakespeare II
  • ENG 744 – Literature and religion in early modern England
  • ENG 861 – Renaissance Lyric
  • ENG 634: Epic


Education

University of Michigan
Ph.D., 1999

University of Virginia
B.A., 1993  

 

Areas of Expertise

  • Milton and his contemporaries
  • Renaissance epic
  • Varieties of post-Reformation religious experience
  • Poetry and poetics
  • Early modern political writing