Margo Kolenda-Mason

Margo Kolenda-Mason (PhD, University of Michigan) joined the SLL as an Assistant Professor of English in 2024. She teaches Renaissance literature, especially poetry, with an emphasis on gender and sexuality studies. Her courses include “Love, Lust, and Loss in Renaissance Poetry,” “Work-Life Balance: Labor in Renaissance Literature,” and “Renaissance Metamorphoses.” As someone who had trouble narrowing down her interests as an undergraduate, pursuing Comparative Literature and Hispanic Studies majors alongside English, she is thrilled to be a part of the interdisciplinary SLL.

Her primary research focus is on the intersection of the economic and the literary in the Early Modern period, although she also dabbles in medieval literature. Her work has appeared or will appear in Renaissance Drama, Arthuriana, and A Cultural History of Solitude in the Early Modern Age. She is working on a book called Fruitless Work: Queer Labor in Early Modern English Literature which analyzes representations of ‘work that isn’t working’ in late sixteenth-century texts. She is deeply invested in making sure that students know that pursuing literary studies is not a form of fruitless labor, but that it can be deeply rewarding and meaningful.