Melissa E. Sanchez received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine, and she studies and teaches sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, with a particular focus on gender, sexuality, and constitutional and religious history. Professor Sanchez has been an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Huntington Library, and in 2009 she received Penn's Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Award for Distinguished Teaching by an Assistant Professor. Her first book, Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature, examines how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers used scenarios of erotic violence and cross-gender identification to explore the origins and limits of political allegiance (Oxford University Press, 2011). She is currently writing a book which argues that consciousness of the debates and genealogies of feminist and queer theory can expand our understandings of female sexuality in both the past and the present. By adopting a pluralistic, even conflicted, theoretical framework, this book reassesses early modern representations of female promiscuity, celibacy, masochism, and homoeroticism in erotic poetry by both women and men. In addition, with Ania Loomba she is co-editing a volume of essays on the current state of studies of race, gender, and sexuality in the early modern period. Along with these book-length projects, Professor Sanchez has written a number of essays on gender, sexuality, and politics in early modern England (for a full list of published and forthcoming work, see her faculty website).