Masten earned a B.A. in English literature and music at Denison University in 1986. He received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania in 1991, with a Ph.D. dissertation under the direction of Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass. At Pennsylvania, he was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. He began his teaching career in the English Department at Harvard University, where he was Gardner Cowles Associate Professor in the Humanities. At Harvard, Masten was executive secretary and a board member of the English Institute. He became an Associate Professor of English at Northwestern University in 1998 and is currently Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northwestern. He has also taught at the Folger Institute of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. Masten was Director of Northwestern's Gender Studies Program from 2005-2008.
Scholarly publications
Masten's published books and articles include influential and "controversial" writing on Renaissance dramatic collaboration and authorship by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, as well as on the early history of sexuality. In 2012 Masten discovered a previously unknown first-edition copy of Christopher Marlowe's 1594 play Edward II, only the second existing copy of the play. He has written influentially on early women's writing in English and on the language of sexuality in early English history. His selected publications include:
'
Editor, with Peter Stallybrass and Nancy J. Vickers, '
Editor, An/The Old Law, by Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, et al., in ', and ', gen. ed. Gary Taylor et al.
. Winner of the 2018 Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Prize for best book in Tudor and Stuart drama.
Since 1997 Masten has been a co-editor of the scholarly journal Renaissance Drama.
Awards
Masten is the recipient of fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, Newberry Library, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Masten is the recipient of Denison University's Alumni Citation award. At Northwestern, Masten was awarded the E. LeRoy Hall Award for Distinguished Teaching in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, named Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence in 2006, and named Herman and Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professor in Literature in 2009.
Other activities
In Shakespeare studies, Masten served as a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America, chairperson of the Modern Language Association Division on Shakespeare, and member of the MLA Committee on the New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. Masten was a member of the Denison University board of trustees from 2010-16 and was reappointed to the board in 2017.
