Sarah Rolfe Prodan

Sarah Rolfe Prodan is a scholar, writer, and educator whose work spans literature, cultural history, religion, art, and intellectual history. An Italianist, early modernist, and Michelangelo scholar, she writes 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.

She is the author of Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism: Spirituality, Poetry and Art in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies by the Modern Language Association, and Poetics of Piety in Early Modern Italy: Devotional Literature and the Spiritual Life in the Long Sixteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2026). She also co-edited Friendship and Sociability in Premodern Europe: Contexts, Concepts and Expressions (CRRS, 2014) with Amyrose McCue Gill.

Prodan is an assistant professor at Stanford University, where her research and teaching focus on literature and culture in interdisciplinary and comparative perspective. Her current book projects include Michelangelo and the Knowing Self and Between Gods & Beasts: The Struggle for Humanity.

Beyond her scholarly writing, Prodan writes fiction and music. Her creative work includes Imminence: Florence, 1494, a historical novel set during the political and spiritual upheavals of Renaissance Florence, and three albums of original music as a singer-songwriter and classically trained pianist.