Mary Kate Guma

Mary Kate Guma is a PhD Candidate in the English Department at Princeton University where she works on Renaissance Literature, with a particular focus on the poetry of the 16th century. Her dissertation, tentatively titled ‘“The Methode of a Poet Historicall”: The Poetics of Real People in Spenser’s Faerie Queene,’ undertakes a study of the mechanics of historical character in Spenser’s poem, asking questions about what exactly makes a historical character different from an original one, how the process of historical characterization interacts with the process of allegorization, and where the line lies between allegory and allusion. Her other research interests include questions of poetic scale and modularity, the relationship between poetry and epistolary writing, and the place of the human body in the history of the book. Prior to her PhD at Princeton, she completed two MPhils at the University of Cambridge– the first in Renaissance Literature and the second in Criticism and Culture– and an undergraduate degree in English and History at Williams College. This year, she is visiting Oxford on the Donald and Mary Hyde Academic Year Research Fellowship and is an associate member of Keble College.