Rate My Professor Sarah Parker

Dr. Sarah E. Parker is a Professor of English at Jacksonville University in the Linda Berry Stein College of Arts & Sciences. She serves as Chair of the Department of Literature, Languages, and Culture, Director of the Center for Gender + Sexuality, and Secretary of the Faculty. Parker joined the faculty in 2012 following the completion of her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a focus on Renaissance Studies and the History of Medicine. Her academic background also includes an M.A. in French Renaissance Literature from Middlebury College and Paris III La Sorbonne Nouvelle, an additional M.A. in Comparative Literature from UNC Chapel Hill, and a B.A. in French and English from the University of North Carolina.

Parker's research specializations center on the intersections between the history of medicine and early modern literary culture. Her academic interests include Renaissance literature and the history of medicine, reading publics, the history of reading and the book, seventeenth-century science in England and the Royal Society, popular error as an early modern medical genre, Thomas Browne, ancient Greek medicine, animal studies, feminist criticism, Native American literature with a focus on Louise Erdrich, the sixteenth-century Italian polymath Girolamo Cardano, and French Huguenots in Florida. Renowned for her dynamic teaching style and dedication to student mentorship, she advises the Gender and Sexuality Alliance, co-advises Advocates for Women’s Empowerment, and supports undergraduate research projects. Her outstanding contributions to teaching and service have been recognized with the 2019 Faculty Excellence Award in Teaching, the 2023 Faculty Woman of the Year award, and the Professor of the Year award. Notable publications include her co-editorship of Reading Publics in Renaissance Europe with Sara Miglietti, a coda contribution to Using Commonplace Books to Enrich Medieval and Renaissance Courses (2023), and the article “Reading and Viewing Sex in Early Modern French Vernacular Medicine” published in Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme (2015).