Sarah Rolfe Prodan
I am an Italianist, early modernist, and Michelangelo scholar whose research and teaching span literature, cultural history, religion, art, and intellectual history. My work centers on Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries while pursuing broader questions about spirituality and religious experience, human nature and selfhood, perception and knowledge, creativity, and the ways individuals understand and fashion themselves in relation to others and the world.
My first monograph, Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism: Spirituality, Poetry and Art in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2014), was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies by the Modern Language Association in 2013. Literary, cultural, and historical in scope, this study examines Michelangelo’s poetics and aesthetics in relation to medieval and Renaissance Augustinianism, lay religious culture, and the Italian Reformation, offering a more nuanced understanding of his spirituality and how it functioned.
My forthcoming book, Poetics of Piety in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2026), offers a thematic genealogical study of the lyric as a site of devotion in early modern Italy. Drawing on a vast and heterogeneous archive of spiritual verse, the book examines poets both well and scarcely known. I approach the devotional lyric as a favored location and privileged instrument of personal and divine encounters, elucidating early modern sacramental poetics in light of epistemological shifts ushered in by projects of religious reform and expansion and by the birth pangs of modern science. Going beyond questions of form, style, genre, and gender, this study addresses the broader non-materialist, non-dualist worldview exemplified in the religious verse itself.
My current research extends these interests in two directions. Michelangelo and the Knowing Self explores questions of perception, knowledge, and selfhood across Michelangelo’s textual and visual production. Between Gods & Beasts: The Struggle for Humanity is a transhistorical and transcultural study of competing conceptions of the human and the enduring tension among humanity, divinity, and animality.
Other book-length work includes Friendship and Sociability in Premodern Europe: Contexts, Concepts and Expressions (CRRS, 2014), an interdisciplinary collection co-edited with Amyrose McCue Gill that explores ideas and instances of friendship across a range of social and cultural contexts in premodern Europe.
Across my scholarship and teaching, I bring literary analysis into conversation with cultural, religious, intellectual, and art history, using the early modern period both as an object of historical inquiry and as a vantage point from which to investigate enduring questions about human experience.
This interdisciplinary approach also shapes my teaching. Whether in lectures or seminars, I bring texts, images, and ideas into conversation with their social, cultural, political, and historical contexts. Though frequently centered on Italy and the early modern period, my courses pursue questions that transcend disciplinary and chronological boundaries, combining field-specific content and methodologies with comparative and interdisciplinary approaches.
Beyond my scholarly work, I am a writer and singer-songwriter. My creative projects include Imminence: Florence, 1494, a historical novel set during the political and spiritual upheavals of Renaissance Florence, and three albums of original music. A classically trained pianist, I write intimate, piano-driven songs that bring together my interests in words, storytelling, and the inner life and explore human experience and transformation.
You can learn more about me and my academic and creative work on my personal website.
