Sarah Marsh
Professorial Lecturer
Department of Literature
Additional Positions at AU
Faculty Director, Complex Problems & University College
Degrees
MFA, University of Pittsburgh (2006); MA, UNC-Chapel Hill (2008); PhD, UNC-Chapel Hill (2013)
Favorite Spot on Campus
The library!
Book Currently Reading
Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World
Bio
Sarah Marsh is a medical humanist who joined AU’s faculty in Literature in 2015. Dr. Marsh holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh, and an MA and PhD in literature from UNC-Chapel Hill, where she studied British romanticism and the history of medicine. At AU, Dr. Marsh teaches at the intersections of medical rhetoric, narrative theory, and the legal history of the body. In support of her interdisciplinary teaching, Dr. Marsh has received a Complex Problems Faculty Fellowship and a Bridges to Collaboration grant. She has published work in Literature & Medicine, The Keats-Shelley Journal, and The New Hibernia Review, which examines the medical dimensions of romantic and modernist fiction. Her forthcoming publications consider race and monstrosity in global children's fiction (Bloomsbury); the medical rhetorics of hypochondria in Jane Austen's last novel fragment (Routledge); and Austen's political critique of Lord Mansfield's ruling in James Somerset's 1772 slave trial in her abolition-era novel, Mansfield Park (Eighteenth-Century Studies). In her book project, Constituting Britons: Law, Medicine, and the Roots of Scientific Racism in Anglo-American Culture, Dr. Marsh situates early modern Britons' embodied ideal of freedom--what they called their "constitution"--as a major source of racial apartheid in the law and medicine of the Anglophone Atlantic.
