Melissa Sanchez Receives MLA Recognition

Melissa Sanchez, Donald T. Regan Professor of English, received recognition from the Modern Language Association (MLA) for her book Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition. The book received an honorable mention for the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, given annually for an outstanding scholarly work that is written by a member of the association and that involves at least two literatures.

In announcing the prize, the award committee stated that Sanchez’s book “brilliantly defamiliarizes well-known early modern texts by Petrarch, Shakespeare, Milton, and others by reading them alongside Pauline theology,” adding that “Sanchez makes a compelling and surprising case for what she calls the ‘translatability of religious writing to queer theory.’”

Sanchez is the author of two other books, Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature, and Shakespeare and Queer Theory.  She is currently editing the Routledge Companion to Queer Literary Studies and has recently begun two new book-length projects: "What Were Women Writers?" and “The Affordances of Guilt." At Penn Arts & Sciences, Sanchez will serve as the director for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and the Alice Paul Center for the 2021-2022 academic year.

Founded in 1883, the MLA and its over 24,000 members in 100 countries work to strengthen the study and teaching of languages and literature.