Sarah Kunjummen

Assistant Instructional Professor, Master of Arts Program in the Humanities, Department of English Language and Literature, The College

I received my PhD in English from the University of Chicago in 2019, and have taught classes on ideas of freedom and agency in early modern Europe, on women's representation of the divine, and on early modern lyric. My undergraduate degrees from the University of Michigan are in English and Classical Languages, and my work focuses on sixteenth and seventeenth-century British literature, with particular interests in poetry, religion, classical reception and the digital humanities. My dissertation research argues that the trope of co-extension in three-dimensional space played a distinctive role in the depictions of intimacy created by seventeenth-century thinkers such as John Milton, Thomas Browne and Margaret Cavendish. These writers provide distinctive accounts of what, for an early modern subject, might be disappointing about life in the body, while paradoxically affirming its centrality for the creation of sociable selves. Recent work of mine includes an essay on the trends in the study of early modern women's writing, in the journal Criticism, and translations of George Herbert's Neo-Latin and Greek verse in a forthcoming Oxford University Press edition of his work. In my spare time, I enjoy exploring Chicago thrift stores, skating on the Midway ice rink, and perfecting my no-knead bread recipe. I am a member of Faculty Forward/SEIU Local 73, the contingent faculty union at the University of Chicago.
 

Female Complaint from Sappho to Aphra Behn (Autumn 2025)
(ENGL 20818/40818) Crosslistings: MAPH 40818

Beginning with influential classical texts, including the poetry of Sappho and Ovid's Heroides, this class explores early modern articulations of female complaint, both in women's writing of the period and as depicted by male writers. The course takes up some works in the mode of gender apologetic and polemic, including excerpts from Christine de Pisan's City of Ladies, Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women" and Rachel Speght's "A Mouzell for Melastomus." It also tracks poetic complaint in the works of such writers as Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne ("Sappho to Philaenis"), Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn, and excerpts of women's life-writing by Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. The class turns to contemporary critical frameworks including affect and trauma studies in order to explore the dynamics of how these texts stage questions of suffering, sympathy and representability. (Medieval/Early Modern)

Lyric Intimacy in the Renaissance (Spring 2026)
(ENGL 27701/47701) Crosslistings: GNSE 24441/44441 MAPH 47701

Lyric has often been perceived as a peculiarly intimate genre, tasked with providing access to a person’s inner experience. This course will examine how sixteenth and seventeenth-century British writers used lyric verse as a tool for establishing, imagining or faking intimacy, with potential lovers, employers, friends, and God. We will ask how the multiple models of intimacy available within English literary culture intersected in texts of the period, and also how that literature responds to or compares with developments elsewhere in the Renaissance Atlantic and Mediterranean world. Along the way, we will explore some of the following questions: what was the gender politics of Renaissance lyric? How did writers make space for queer or heteronormative writing and attachment within the conventions of the love poem? What looks familiar about the forms of intimacy we find in these texts? What remains profoundly strange about them? Readings will include poems by Philip Sidney, Mary Wroth, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Katherine Philips and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. (Medieval/Early Modern)