Sarah Barnette
Writer, Educator, and Critical thinker in the United States
Sarah holds a Ph.D in English Literature from the University of Oxford where she examined mid-to-late 19th C. conceptions of sympathy. She concentrated on how women writers of this period deployed the language and theories of sympathy in their fiction to experiment with defusing situations of religious and cultural difference. Vernon Lee (1856-1935) and George Eliot (1819-1880) are central figures in Sarah’s work.
Sarah completed her undergraduate degree (BA Summa Cum Laude) with a dual major in the Humanities (English concentration) and French at Messiah College before earning her M.Litt in Romantic and Victorian Literature at the University of St. Andrews.
Besides her academic studies, Sarah is a sketch artist and photographer with an interest in documentary filmmaking. She considers the visual and material culture of Victorian studies an essential part of her literary research, especially in light of nineteenth-century views of sympathy that extended to haptic and affective relationships between people and places, and people and objects.
Sarah is currently a Professional Writing Tutor at Villanova University.