Brock University’s Distinguished Professor designation is a lifetime appointment recognizing outstanding achievement in each recipient’s academic discipline. This series of articles highlights this year’s recipients. Read more about the award and its recipients on The Brock News.

Elizabeth Sauer has studied the writings of Renaissance author John Milton for four decades, fascinated by what his poems and prose reveal about being human in a fragmented world.

According to the Professor of English Language and Literature, Milton’s works mirror a core attribute of Humanities scholarship: a desire to embrace the civic roles of contributing knowledge to public forums and creating and championing a community of active, informed citizens.

Sauer was one of 10 Brock professors recently recognized with the new Distinguished Professor designation by the Office of the President for her pioneering and transdisciplinary work in the field of English literature.

“I’m motivated by curiosity, challenges and collaborations,” she says. “Researching the Renaissance inevitably generates scholarship that embraces many branches of knowledge, that is, many sciences.”

Sauer says that going beyond the boundaries between disciplines can generate new literary frameworks and ways of thinking.

Concentrating on the intersections of Renaissance and early modern literature and history, Sauer explores histories of imperialism, political and religious opposition, women’s writings, and early models of toleration and nationhood.

Through her research, she demonstrates how examinations of literary culture contribute to other fields of inquiry, including history, religion, human relations, philosophy and communications technologies.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a National Research Council of Canada Killam Research Laureate, Sauer’s research has an international reach.

Her publications number more than 60 essays, 100 conference papers and 19 books, including edited and co-edited collections. Her in-progress book Reorienting English National Consciousness is supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant, which is funded by the Government of Canada.

In her new book, Sauer maintains that the subject of English nationalism offers an important extension of research on British, Irish and American identity formation.

“Evidence from a wealth of imaginative works and additional archival materials produced by English and Anglo-American authors informs the ‘writing of the nation,’  and the conjoined concept of liberty as a vital and contested feature thereof,” Sauer says.

Once completed, the book will contribute to English literary and cultural history from the late 1500s through to 1700.

In addition to being President of the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies/Société canadienne d’études de la Renaissance, Sauer is a Milton Society of America Honored Scholar, the Society’s highest distinction and lifetime achievement award.

“I always return to Milton because of the magnificence of his verse and his experimentations with genre, and because his writings showcase revolutionary thinking, laborious scholarly pursuits, theories of education, and conceptions of moral philosophy,” she says.