Elizabeth Harris Sagaser teaches, writes, and writes about a wide range of poetry. Her original specialty is sixteenth and seventeenth century English literature, especially poetry, and she always offers courses in these periods. She also teaches various courses in literary history and theory and senior seminars that bring together major ideas about language from linguistics, philosophy, and psychology as well as poetics. She has published numerous scholarly essays on Renaissance literature, personal essays, and poems. The underlying concern of much of her scholarship, teaching and poetry is how people have used, and do use, literature--especially poetry-- to cope with their knowledge of human fragility.

Scholarship

“Poetry of England, the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Stephen Cushman, Roland Greene, et. al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, new edition, forthcoming, 2011), 5500 words.

"Pursuing the Subtle Thief: Teaching Time and Meter in Milton's Short Poems," Approaches to Teaching Milton's Shorter Poetry and Prose, Peter C. Herman, ed. (New York, NY: Modern Language Association of America; 2007), 88-96.

“Elegiac Intimacy: Pembroke’s ‘To the Angell Spirit of the Most Excellent Sir Philip Sidney,’” The Sidney Journal 23 (2005 by name, 2006 publication date): 111-132.

"Flirting with Eternity: Teaching Form and Meter in a Renaissance Poetry Course," Renaissance Literature and the Questions of Form, ed. Mark Rasmussen (New York: Palgrave at St. Martin's Press, 2002), 185-206.

“‘Sporting the While': Carpe Diem and the Cruel Fair in Samuel Daniel’s Delia and The Complaint of Rosamond,” Exemplaria 10 (1998): 145-170.

“Shakespeare’s Sweet Leaves: Mourning, Pleasure, and the Triumph of Thought in the Renaissance Love Lyric,” ELH 61 (1994): 1-26.

“‘Gathered in Time’: Form, Meter (and Parentheses) in The Shepheardes Calender,” Spenser Studies 10 (1992): 95-107.

Essays

"Poetry, the First Milk," The Chronicle of Higher Education (2/11/2011, Vol. 57 Issue 23): B11-B13. http://chronicle.com/article/Poetry-the-First-Milk/126182/

“Holding Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand," Tennis, (March 2007, Miller Sports Group LLC): 90-94.

“’No Proper Sphere’ for Mum, but She Made One for Me, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sect.2, Aug.10, 2001, B5.

Reviews

Double review: Pamela S. Hammons, Poetic Resistance: English Women Writers and the Early Modern Lyric (Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2002) and Sidney L. Sondergard. Sharpening Her Pen: Strategies of Rhetorical Violence by Early Modern English Women Writers (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP; London: Associated UP, 2002), Renaissance Quarterly 57.1 (2004): 339-341.

Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Harvard UP, 1997), Sixteenth Century Journal 29 (1998): 858-860.

Barbara Estrin, Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell (Duke UP), Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 310-311.

Poems

“Easter Bunny” The Southern Review 40 (2004): 478; "Sometimes" "I Will" The Southern Review 36 (2000): 534-536; “Eve of Conception (I)” “Eve of Conception (II)” Chicago Review 38 (1992): 65-6; “Love Without Poems” “Certainty on Naples Road: Watching Him Sleep” Prairie Schooner 65 (1991): 115-116.