Assistant Professor of English Receives Best Book Award
June 2007
Zachary Lesser was awarded the first Elizabeth Dietz Prize for his book Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publishing: Readings in the English Book Trade. The award is given each year by the journal Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 for the best book published in early modern studies.
Lesser is an assistant professor of English who came to Penn in 2006. His research focuses on Tudor and Stuart drama, print culture and the history of the book, early modern political culture and other areas. Currently, he is at work on two books: Print, Plays and Popularity in Shakespeare’s England (with Alan Farmer) and The Birth of Tragicomedy: Mixed Form, Mixed Politics in Renaissance Drama. He is also developing the Web resource DEEP (Database of Early English Playbooks), a search engine that will allow scholars to investigate the publishing, printing and marketing of Renaissance drama.