Tobias Gregory
Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies
Office: Marist 334
Office Phone: 202 319 5488
Email Address: gregoryt@cua.edu
Education: B.A., Virginia, 1993; Ph.D., Michigan, 1999
Research interests
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, particularly English and Italian epic; Milton and his contemporaries; varieties of post-Reformation religious experience; political writing; poetry and poetics
Research
Tobias Gregory writes mainly about the literature and culture of early modern England, with a serious secondary interest in Italian literature. His articles and review essays on Milton, Spenser, Tasso, Empson, Ariosto, Browne et al. have appeared in ELH, Renaissance Quarterly, SEL, Milton Studies, Modern Philology, Huntington Library Quarterly, 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.
Professor 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--religious studies, 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.
Professor Gregory is currently at work on a study of Milton, Milton's Strenuous Liberty, which has led him from the comparative genre-based approach of Many Gods to the broad intersection of literature, religion, and politics in mid-seventeenth-century England.
Selected publications
- From Many Gods to One: Divine Action in Renaissance Epic. University of Chicago Press, 2006.
- "The Political Messages of Samson Agonistes." SEL 50 (2010) 175-203.
- "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.
Teaching
Professor Gregory supervises graduate student research in most areas of early modern literary studies. His 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, the history of English literature, and epic poetry from Homer to the present. He is an associated faculty member in CUA's University Honors Program. Professor Gregory also enjoys discussing Shakespeare with audiences outside the university, and to that end has collaborated with the Smithsonian and with the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, DC.
Selected syllabi
- Literature and Religion in Early Modern England (graduate)
- Renaissance epic (graduate)
- Shakespeare's political drama (undergraduate)
Administration
Professor Gregory directs the graduate program in English at CUA. For more information about the graduate program, see here.
