At Marywood University:

• English 160. Composition and Rhetoric
• English 180. Introduction to World Literature
• English 334A. Medieval Tolkien
• English 337A. Contemporary Fantasy Literature
• English 360. British Literature I
• English 360A. Early Modern British Women Writers
• English 365A. Early English Drama
• English 368A. Early Modern Poetry
• English 370. Shakespeare
• English 381. Chaucer
• English 399. English and Irish Literature of Conflict and Rebellion
• English 399A. European Renaissance Literature
• English H399. Special Topics: Hamlet and its Afterlives
• English H399. Special Topics: Digital Shakespeare
• English 399. Special Topics: Creating a Digital Archive of Marywood’s Social Justice
• English 423/523. Technologies of Writing
• English 484. Political Writing and Rhetoric
• English 495. Senior Seminar
• University 100. Living Responsibly in an Interdependent World

• Ph.D., English Language and Literature, University of Maryland, College Park, 2005. Dissertation: “‘In writing it may be spoke’: The Politics of Women’s Letter-Writing, 1377-1603.” 
• M.A., English Language and Literature, University of Maryland, College Park, 1999.
• B.A., English Literature, Minor in French, The College of New Jersey, 1997.

Dr. Sadlack earned her doctoral degree at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she studied medieval and early modern women writers, as well as the history of rhetoric and digital humanities. Her dissertation on the politics and rhetoric of women’s letter-writing included work on the French medieval writer Christine de Pizan, the Tudor princess Mary the French Queen, and women petitioners to Elizabeth I. She received training in paleography at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, and has done archival research at the Folger, the British Library and the College of Arms in London, the National Archives at Kew, the Morgan Library in New York City, and the Bodleian and Queen’s College Libraries in Oxford.

Her book on Mary Tudor, the French queen, and women’s letter-writing, titled The French Queen’s Letters: Mary Tudor Brandon and the Politics of Marriage in Sixteenth-Century Europe, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011 as part of its Queenship and Power series and included an edition of all of Mary’s extant letters. Dr. Sadlack looked at the influence of literary depictions of letter-writing and the rhetoric of spectacle in early modern England to consider how Mary negotiated for power as part of her exercise of queenship. In addition to her work on Mary, Dr. Sadlack has also published essays on the rhetoric of Elizabethan women’s petition letters in the sixteenth century.

Dr. Sadlack’s interests in editing and the digital humanities have led her to her current project, editing Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for Linked Early Modern Drama Online. She argues that the play is much more than a love story and that it comments on class and gender and violence in fascinating ways, and that, in fact, one of the most interesting characters in the play whom no one ever remembers is Potpan.

Dr. Sadlack taught classes in English literature and rhetoric for nineteen years at Marywood University in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where she also served as Women’s Studies Director, Honors Program Director, Chair of the Communication, Language, and Literature Department, and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. She has a particular interest in developing interdisciplinary programming and connections between the university and the community.

Honors/Awards:

• CASE Professor of the Year, Marywood University, 2009.
• Alice Geyer Dissertation Prize, University of Maryland, 2006.
• Harman-Ward Dissertation Fellowship, University of Maryland, 2004-2005.
• Cosmos Club Foundation Young Scholars Award, The Cosmos Club Foundation Program of Grants-in-Aid to Young Scholars, Washington, D.C., February 2004.
• QCB Travel Grant, Department of English, University of Maryland, January 2003.
• Networked Associate, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, September 2000.

Publications:

• Books
  • The French Queen’s Letters: Mary Tudor Brandon and the Politics of Marriage in Sixteenth- Century Europe, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
• Articles/Essays
  • “’Poor and Daily Orators’: The Rhetoric of Elizabethan Women’s Petitions,” Feminist Circulations: Rhetorical Explorations across Space and Time. Eds. Jessica Enoch, Karen Nelson, and Danielle Griffin. Parlor Press, 2021.
  • “Literary Lessons in Queenship and Power: Mary Tudor Brandon and the Authority of the Ambassador-Queen.” Women and Power at the French Court, 1483-1563. Ed. Susan Broomhall. Amsterdam University Press, 2018. Knowledge Unlatched selected this volume as one of nine 2019 Amsterdam UP books to grant open access to all readers. The essay may be found here.
  • “Epistolary Negotiations: Mary the French Queen and the Politics of Letter-Writing.” Sixteenth Century Journal 41.3 (Fall 2010). “
  • Petitioning Power: Rhetorical Fashioning in Elizabethan Women’s Letters.” New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 2002-2006. Vol. IV. Ed. Michael Denbo, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008.
• Hypertext Editions
  • Editor, William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Linked Early Modern Drama Online, hosted by the University of Victoria. Peer reviewed. Project in progress.
  • General Editor, Robert Southey’s Wat Tyler. Coordinating Editor Matthew Hill. Published on Romantic Circles, 2004. Peer reviewed.
• Other Publications
  • Review of Shakespeare through Letters, by David M. Bergeron, Lexington Books, 2020. Shakespeare Newsletter (Vol 72.1 Winter 2022/2023).
  • Contributor, A Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern Englishwomen, Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts, 1500-1650: Eds. Carole Levin, Jo Carney, Anna Bertolet: “Mary Tudor Brandon,” “Frances Brandon,” and “Eleanor Brandon,” Routledge, 2016.
  • Review of Epistolary Community in Print, 1580-1664, by Diana Barnes, Ashgate, 2013, Prose Studies (August 2014).
  • Review of Writing Gender in Women’s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance, by Meredith K. Ray, University of Toronto Press, 2009, Sixteenth Century Journal, 42.4 (Winter 2011).
  • “Workshop 6: Gendering Government and Governing Gender” in Masculinities, Childhood, Violence: Attending to Early Modern Women—and Men. Proceedings of the 2006 Symposium. Eds. Amy E. Leonard and Karen L. Nelson, University of Delaware Press (2011), 139-42.
  • Review of The Castell of Love, A Critical Edition of Lord Berners’s Romance, by ed. Joyce Boro, Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 2007 in Speculum (October 2008).
  • Review of Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400-1700 by eds. Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb, Ashgate Press, 2005 in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2006).
  • Contributor, Renaissance and Reformation: 1500-1620: A Biographical Dictionary. Ed. Jo Eldridge Carney. Greenwood Press, 2001: “Marguerite de Navarre,” “Clément Marot,” “Guillaume Budé,” “Honoré D’Urfé,” “Pierre de Brantôme,” “Jeanne D’Albret,” and “Nicholas Udall.”

I believe that education is transformative, that it should help students to learn new ideas and skills as well as to learn about themselves and their gifts, and to consider what constitutes a well-lived life and what responsibilities they have to a global community.

Intelligent, passionate, critical, respectful debate where we talk about what we’ve read and then listen and learn from one another lies at the heart of all my classes. Such discussion works best when all students contribute their insights. I therefore typically employ a wide range of activities in the classroom, from various types of small and large group discussion to presentations to lectures to acting out scenes or reading aloud.

We also explore the ways that digital tools, multimedia texts, and instructional technologies can help us analyze literature and language in new ways. I think it’s important for students’ assignments to engage with the public world outside the classroom wherever possible.

My classes prepare students for their future by helping them to read critically, to write at a sophisticated level, to develop critical thinking skills further, and hopefully in the process, to learn to respect the power of words and to appreciate—maybe even love—the ways that stories and language can inspire and transform our lives and the world around us.

I am currently editing a digital edition of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for Linked Early Modern Drama Online, which seeks to provide open-access, peer-reviewed editions of early English drama that are coded for long-term digital preservation. My project includes a scholarly edition of the play complete with linked annotations and textual notes, the text of the original language of the Quarto One, Quarto Two, and First Folio publications, and contextual essays.

A digital edition enables students and scholars alike to explore the different versions of the play (five versions of the play were circulating by 1623; the first is around 700 lines shorter than the others and has different stage directions. Sometimes Romeo says, “Parting is such sweet sorrow”; sometimes it’s Juliet’s line. The changes can have a real impact on the way we experience the scene, and digital editions can thus open new avenues of inquiry.)

I also continue to work on the rhetoric of Elizabethan women’s petition letters to the Queen and Privy Council as part of my research on early modern women’s letter-writing.