Gregory M. Colón Semenza is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, where he has worked since 2001. He earned his Ph.D. in Renaissance literature at the Pennsylvania State University, where he also taught courses ranging from Business Writing to Shakespeare. At UConn, Semenza teaches a number of courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels—most commonly English 3113 (Renaissance Literature), English 3503 (Shakespeare), English 5323 (Non-Shakespearean Renaissance Drama), and English 5329 (Milton). Special topics courses he regularly teaches include English 3695: Satanic Literature, and graduate seminars on Shakespeare and film and popular culture. Semenza has won the university’s two most prestigious teaching awards: the AAUP’s Excellence Award for Teaching Promise and the 2005 University Teaching Fellows Award. In the summer of 2004, Semenza co-taught an NEH seminar entitled “Reinventing Shakespeare.” In the summer of 2006, he created and began co-teaching with Bob Hasenfratz the UConn Summer in London Program.

In 2004, Semenza published his first book: Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance (University of Delaware Press), which received positive reviews in over a dozen journals and magazines, including TLS. His other books include Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; expanded 2nd ed. 2010); The English Renaissance in Popular Culture: An Age for All Time (Palgrave, 2010); and, with Laura L. Knoppers, Milton in Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). He is currently writing a monograph called Fictional Milton and is also at work on his first novel, a fantasy entitled Race of Worshippers: The Satan Chronicles I. Semenza has published numerous essays on such other topics as Tim Blake Nelson’s O, children’s versions of Milton’s Comus, wrestling in The Canterbury Tales, silent film, and Shakespeare: The Animated Tales.

Semenza lives in Storrs, Connecticut with his wife Cristina and his six- and three-year old sons, Alexander and Benjamin. In his other life, he is a film fanatic, a distance runner, cyclist, and all-around fitness junkie who recently completed his first Ironman event.