Sandra Logan

Biography

Sandra Logan is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English, having served actively on the faculty from 2002-2022. Her administrative work includes serving as director of the founding Citizen Scholars program from 2016-2019, and as the founding director of the Global Literary and Cultural Studies Research Cluster from 2004-2009, and as Acting Director of Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities in 2008. She has been core faculty in the GenCen since its founding, has twice served as chair of the GenCen Advisory Committee, has been a Fellow of the HUB for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (now the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning), and has undertaken Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training through a variety of programs.

Her early research includes the history and theory of drama (including Shakespeare), poetry and poetics, historiography, and women writers; her recent research focuses on questions of political theory and political formations across early modern and contemporary contexts. Her first book,Text /Events in Early Modern England: Poetics of History (Ashgate, 2007) explores early modern strategies of authority, authorship, and social formation, undertaking comparative analysis of historiographic and dramatic records of events, as a means more clearly assess the nature of historical events documented therein, and offering insight into the challenges of interpreting historical accounts. Her second book, Shakespeare’s Foreign Queens: Drama, Politics, and the Enemy Within (Palgrave, 2018), brings contemporary and early modern theories of sovereignty to bear on Shakespeare’s depictions of women from ‘enemy nations’ who marry into foreign royal families as queens consort or empresses. She considers their vexed relationship to their new political contexts and families and explores the implications of four key terms in contemporary political theory: fragmented identity, hospitality, citizenship, and exile, focusing on a particular foreign queen in each chapter. She is currently developing an invited monograph for Arden’s ‘Shakespeare and Theory’ series (editor Evelyn Gajowski), titled Shakespeare and Political Theology, which will offer an introduction to the key concepts and theorists of ‘political theology’, provide a an overview of scholarship related to this theoretical approach, and undertake an analysis of Shakespeare’s history plays through the lens of political theology. Projected publication date Spring 2025. Additionally, related to her interest in sociopolitical formations, she is planning a longer-range research project on ‘Commons, Commoning, and the Common Good’, which will link early modern and historical theories and practices related to these three concepts, with the aim of making visible the long historical project of thinking, living, and working in cooperative, collaborative, and mutually sustaining ways.

She has received research awards including the Intramural Research Grant from MSU (2004-5 and 2009-10), a Fellowship from the Folger Shakespeare Library (2007), and Newberry Library Early Modern Studies Consortium funding, which have supported research residencies at the Newberry Library, the Folger Library, the British Library, and the British Film Institute. In both her teaching and research, she endeavors to use theoretical and literary texts of the past to reflect on critical, social, and political questions of the present.