Melanie Simoes Santos

Melanie Simoes Santos specializes in early Modern English literature and culture.

Her current book project, Nuns in the Early Modern Sexual Imaginary, argues that the Dissolution of the nunneries (1536–1540) put the dispossessed nun at the centre of sexual thought in early modern England. Combining archival and material culture methodologies with feminist and queer theory, this project opens new understandings of the consecrated virgin’s erotic afterlives in early modern English literary culture.

Her work has been published in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing and her article “The Nun in the Attic: The Sisters of Coughton Court” is forthcoming in Renaissance Quarterly.

As a current member of the Graduate Academic Unit, Dr. Simoes Santos welcomes proposals from graduate students working on early modern literature and is particularly interested in supervising projects that engage this literature’s negotiation of gender, sexuality and race.