Tiffany Jo Werth

Tiffany Jo Werth (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Professor of English. Previously, she taught at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. Her research interests include Renaissance literature (particularly in its nondramatic forms), Reformation history, print culture, posthumanism, and the long history of environmental narratives. She also offers courses on speculative fiction / fantasy literature and utopian thought. 

Her work on the thorny relationship of romance to the long English Reformation has appeared in article form in the Shakespearean International Yearbook  and English Literary Renaissance and as her first monograph The Fabulous Dark Cloister: Romance in England after the Reformation (Johns Hopkins University Press). Her current book entitled The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton (Oxford University Press) argues that the mineral (clay, rocks, stones, bezoars, iron) offers an unsettling touchstone for rethinking Renaissance humanism and literary creation. 

She has published on the more-than-human world as editor of a special issue of The Shakespearean International Yearbook and in articles in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, Literature Compass Online, Upstart: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, and a special issue of Spenser Studies on "Spenser and the Human." She co-edited a never-before-printed academic drama The Converted Robber or Stonehenge, a Pastoral in English Literary Renaissance. Her co-edited collection (with Vin Nardizzi) Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination (U of Toronto 2019) explores how the places (local and global) where contributors research and teach shape their scholarship on Medieval and Renaissance English literature. She has also been the guest editor for a special issue of the Spenser Review  on the topic of ecological Spenser and Spenserians futures. 

She is currently at work on two new related research projects. The first is a topic of a UCLA Clark Library conference on Energy Transitions in Long Modernity and the second explores early modern cosmology through the lens of cosmocriticism. 

She was a Mellon long-term fellow at the Huntington Library (2016-2017) and Visiting Scholar at the Early Modern Studies Institute, President of the International Spenser Society (2018-2019), and co-founder and past Director of Oecologies, a Pacific Coast scholarly research collective. She was the PI for a University of California Humantities Research Institute funded multicampus faculty working group “On the Sea and Coastal Ecologies: Early Modern Pasts and Uncertain Futures” (2020-2022). Currently, she also serves as the Program Director for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) and as Director of Undergraduate Studies.