The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
Melissa E. Sanchez received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. Her research and teaching focus on feminism, queer theory, and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, and she has been a Core Faculty member in Penn's Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program since 2006.
Professor Sanchez is the author of three books. Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford University Press, 2011); Shakespeare and Queer Theory (Bloomsbury Arden "Shakespeare and Theory" series, 2019). Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition reassesses key texts of the pre-history of modern monogamy—from Paul to Luther, Petrarch to Shakespeare—to show that writing assumed to promote fidelity in fact articulates the perversity of desire and the elusiveness of self-knowledge (NYU Press, "Sexual Cultures" series, 2019). She has also edited three volumes of essays Spenser and 'the Human, co-edited with Ayesha Ramachandran (Spenser Studies, 2015); Desiring History and Historicizing Desire, co-edited with Ari Friedlander and Will Stockton (Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies (JEMCS), 2016; and Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race, and Sexuality, co-edited with Ania Loomba, which received the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (SSEMW) Award for Best Collaborative Project of 2016 (Routledge, 2016). She is currently editing the Routledge Companion to Queer Literary Studies (under contract) and has recently begun two new book-length projects: "What Were Women Writers?" and “The Affordances of Guilt."