Melissa E. Sanchez received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. She studies and teaches sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature and history, and she is particularly interested in gender studies, constitutional and religious historiography, and early modern political theory. She has been an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Huntington Library, and her articles have appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Sidney Journal, the Huntington Library Quarterly, English Literary History, English Literary Renaissance, and Studies in Philology. Her current book project, entitled Erotic Subjects in English Literature from Sidney to Milton, examines the political import of the perverse and ambivalent erotic relations depicted in early modern literature. She has also recently begun a second book-length project on the intersections of kinship, property, sexuality, and political loyalty in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pastoral poetry.