Sarah Van der Laan
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
Education
Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies and English, Yale University, 2008
M.A. in Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary College, University of London, 2002
M.A. in Intellectual and Cultural History, Queen Mary College, University of London, 2002
B.A. in Renaissance Studies, Yale University, 2000
(812) 855-0737
Ballantine Hall 919
spvander 
indiana.edu
I write and teach about the culture of the European Renaissance. My work focuses on the interdisciplinary study of the interactions between literature, music, art, and architecture, and of the interactions of those cultural products with the material and social contexts in which they took shape. I am currently working on a book that explores the reception of the Odyssey in Renaissance Europe and situates the rewritings of Homer’s epic by major European artists in the context of the cultural history of the Odyssey. My project thus provides new readings of major works by poets and musicians including Lodovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Claudio Monteverdi, and John Milton, while at the same time shedding light on a neglected area of the history of the early modern book.
My interest in the materiality of Renaissance texts has been fed by my work as a research assistant for The Textual Life of William Shakespeare, a research project headed by Lukas Erne at the Université de Genève, and by my ongoing role as an Associate Scholar of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, Queen Mary College, University of London. Other interests and future projects include the roles of madrigal and opera in various literary traditions, the interplay of epic and mock-epic, and the development of early modern concepts of tyrannicide in theoretical and imaginative literature.
Research Highlights
What Virtue and Wisdom Can Do: Homer’s Odyssey in the Renaissance Imagination (book manuscript in progress)
“Milton’s Odyssean Ethics: Homeric Allusions and Arminian Thought in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 49 (2009).
Recent Courses
- CMLT 205: Comparative Literary Analysis: Writing About Writing
- CMLT 355: Literature, the Other Arts, and Their Interrelationship: Power and Privilege in Renaissance Europe
Selected Honors and Awards
- Visiting Scholar, Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, Queen Mary College, University of London, 2007
- Robert M. Leylan Dissertation Fellowship, Yale University, 2006-07
- James M. Osborn Fellowship, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Summer 2005
- Richard J. Franke Fellowship, Yale University, 2002-04
