Sarah is a sixth-year PhD candidate in the department of English Literature. Her dissertation studies spatial imaginaries in the eighteenth-century British novel, with a particular interest in the production and use of underground spaces in relation to anti-colonial spatial acts: fugitivity, marronage, revolt, refusal. Beyond the novel, she is also interested in critical geographies, archives and archival loss, hauntology, Enlightenment epistemologies, and feminist and embodied approaches to epistemology.
At the intersection of Sarah’s teaching and research is an exploration of systems governing knowledge production in the university and the restrictions these structures place on who can know—or who can access and contribute to knowledge—and the kinds of knowing we can produce. These interests were formed while working with students in writing centers across the New York Metropolitan area from 2014 – 2023. Here at Yale, she has continued to pose this question in the two first-year writing seminars she’s taught: “Architecture of a Haunting” (2024 – 2025) and “Our Bodies, Our Selves” (2023 – 2024). As a McDougal Graduate Teaching Fellow, she is particularly interested in how teaching centers can be generative spaces for instructors looking to transform their classrooms.