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Alzada Tipton grew up around the world as the child of two Foreign Service Officers. She attended high school in a suburb of Washington, D.C, participating in a program at the Folger Shakespeare Library for high school juniors as well as a summer Shakespearean acting program at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon.

While working on her PhD in British Renaissance literature, Tipton worked full time at a North Carolina conservation center for big cats and keystone rainforest species. She began her faculty career in the English Department at Hamline University in St. Paul. She moved into administration at Hamline, and subsequently went to Elmhurst College in the suburbs of Chicago to be the vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty. In 2016, she came to Whitman to be provost and dean of the faculty. In 2024, she stepped down from the provost position and joined the English Department.

During her time as a faculty member and administrator, she has volunteered at a wolf education program, a raptor center, two wildlife rehabilitation centers and a humane society.

B.A., English with honors
Johns Hopkins University

M.A. and Ph.D., English
Duke University.

Tipton primarily does research on Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex (1565–1601) and his impact on Elizabethan literature.

“’How many would the peaceful city quit/To welcome him’: The Earl of Essex on parade,” Early Modern Literary Studies, 2023, vol. 23, 1. 

“The Acidale Test: Spenser’s Jettisoning of Sidney as Poetic Authoriser,” Cahiers Elisabethains, Nov 2021, vol. 106, 1, pp. 3-23.

“’All mens eyes are fixed vpon you’: Dedications of Printed Works to the Earl of Essex and the Creation of Essex’s Public Persona,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, Spring 2021, vol. 52, 1, pp. 111-40.

“Gain and Disdain: Patronal Obligations in the Works of Edmund Spenser,” Neophilologus, vol. 104, no. 4, December, 2020, pp. 601-19.

“’What Hath Been His Mind?’: Motivation, History, and Theatre in Samuel Daniel’s Philotas, Studies in Philology, vol. 117, no. 1, Winter, 2020, pp. 40-75.

“’Lively Patternes for Affayres of State’: Sir John Hayward’s Life and Reigne of King Henrie IIII and the Earl of Essex,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 33, no. 3, Fall 2002, pp. 769-94.

“Poetry, Patronage, and Identity in the Dance of the Graces, Book VI of The Faerie Queene,” Renaissance Papers 2002, 91-104.

“The Transformation of the Earl of Essex: Post-Execution Ballads and ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle,’” Studies in Philology, vol. 99, no. 1, Winter 2002, pp.57-80.

“Caught Between “Vertue” and “Memorie”: Providential and Political Historiography in Samuel Daniel’s The Civil Wars,” The Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 61, nos. 3-4, 2002, pp.325-41.

“‘The meanest man shall be permitted freely to accuse’: The Commoners in the Anonymous Play Woodstock,” in Comparative Drama, volume 32, no. 1, Spring 1998, 117-45.  Also published in Reformations: Religion, Rulership, and the Sixteenth-Century English Stage, ed. Grace Tiffany (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998).

‘Richard II and Theories of the Subaltern Magistrate,’ in The Upstart Crow: A Shakespeare Journal, volume XVI, 1996, 48-69.

‘Caught Between the Letter and the Hole in the Wall: Samuel Daniel’s Competing Versions of Historiography’ in Proceedings of the Third Dakotas Conference on Earlier British Literature, ed. Bruce E. Brandt (an initial and partial version of the HLQ article above).