Melissa Sanchez Studies Sexuality by Looking at Renaissance Love Lyrics

Melissa Sanchez, associate professor of English, is using the language and history of 16th- and 17th-century poetry to examine issues of gender, sexuality, and romance in the past and modern-day. Sanchez, a core faculty member of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies, says that reading Renaissance texts enriches understanding of both the historical insights about the period when the literature was written and about current cultural conditions.

Typically, Sanchez says, this poetry is read with the assumption that the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century gave rise to normative thinking in the Western world that sex in marriage is healthy and good while sex outside marriage damnable and dangerous. But, looking at poetry from the period, Sanchez says, marriage was not idealized as it is today. Rather, poets such as Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, and Katherine Phillips considered the consequences of the early Protestant conviction that, even within marriage, sexual desire is dangerous because it represents the irrational and uncontrollable human will more generally.

“One of the poets I work with, John Donne, who was married and by all accounts very much in love with his wife,” Sanchez says, "wrote in a poem...that it’s good that she’s with God now, but also that her death is good for Donne because now his love for her—itself a part of the world, flesh and devil—is not tempting him to forget his relationship with God.”

Click here to read the full article.

Arts & Sciences News

Azuma and Hart Named Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professors of American History

Eiichiro Azuma specializes in Asian American and transpacific history, while Emma Hart teaches and researches the history of early North America, the Atlantic World, and early modern Britain between 1500 and 1800.

View Article >
Arts & Sciences Students Honored during 37th Annual Women of Color Day

Sade Taiwo, C’25, and Kyndall Nicholas, a Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience, were honored for their work.

View Article >
Nine College Students and Alums Named Thouron Scholars; Will Pursue Graduate Studies in the U.K.

The Scholars are six seniors and three recent graduates whose majors range from neuroscience to communication.

View Article >
Irma Elo Named Tamsen and Michael Brown Presidential Professor in Sociology

Elo’s main research interests center on inequalities in health and mortality across the life course and demographic estimation of mortality. In recent years, she has extended her research to include predictors of cognition in high-, middle-, and low-income countries.

View Article >
Julia Hartmann Named Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor in Mathematics

She specializes in algebra and arithmetic geometry, a newer field that applies techniques from algebraic geometry to solve problems in number theory and co-developed the method of field patching.

View Article >
Holger Sieg Named Baird Term Professor of Economics

Sieg focuses his research on public and urban economics, as well as the political economy of state and local governments.

View Article >