Maureen Quilligan has as a primary field of interest the Renaissance, with special attention to women and literature. She has published three books The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (1979) Milton's Spenser: The Politics of Reading (1983) and The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan's Cite des Dames (1991). She has also co-edited two volumes of essays titled Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (1986) and Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, published in 1996 by Cambridge University Press. Among other fellowships she has held a Guggenheim and an ACLS and was awarded the Sidonie Clauss Prize for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities at Yale (1983) as well as the Undergraduate Advisory Board Teaching Prize at the University of Pennsylvania (1997). She has just completed a book on incest and female agency in the Renaissance. She also is at work on two other projects: female political authority in the sixteenth century, and slavery in the Renaissance epic.