Sandra Logan

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 founding director of the Citizen Scholars program from 2016-2019, 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, and co-director from 2011-12. 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.

Her forthcoming book for Arden’s ‘Shakespeare and Theory’ series (editor Evelyn Gajowski), titled Shakespeare and Theories of Political Theology, offers an overview of the key concepts and theorists of ‘political theology’, both twentieth-century and early modern, provides an review of scholarship related to this theoretical approach, and undertakes an analysis of Shakespeare’s Richard II through the lens of political theology. Projected publication date is July, 2026.

Additionally, related to her interest in sociopolitical formations, she is engaged in a longer-range research project on ‘Commons, Commoning, and the Common Good’, which links 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.