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.
 

Faeries, Demons and Alchemists: Science, Magic and the Supernatural in Early Modern England (Autumn 2024)

This course aims to explore the messy territory between the scientific, the magical and the religious in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Readings will draw on scholarship in the history of science, by writers such as Frances Yates and Steven Shapin, and on period reflections on the pursuit of knowledge by thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne Margaret Cavendish and Robert Boyle, as well as representations of occult knowledge in the period's literature. Readings may include Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Jonson's The Alchemist, selections from Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and Bacon's The New Atlantis.

Renaissance Now (Winter 2025)

This class will think about the reception of the Renaissance, in scholarship and popular culture, or from Burkhardt to Beyonce. What is at stake in the term? What does it mean to periodize a Western cultural past in this way, or to be founding a Renaissance in the present? Readings will include seminal accounts of the Renaissance by thinkers such as Jacob Burkhardt, Aby Warburg, Paul Oscar Kristeller and Joan Kelly, as well as contemporary cultural objects ranging from the film Shakespeare in Love to the fiction of Hilary Mantel and work in the visual arts by artists such as Kehinde Wiley and Harmonia Rosales.