Sarah Wasserman
Appointments
Assistant Dean for Faculty Affairs
Biography
I am a scholar who specializes in the stuff that surrounds us and what it’s doing in 20th and 21st century American literature.
I’m currently Assistant Dean for faculty affairs in Arts & Sciences where I serve as impartial resource for faculty in a range of areas, including conflict resolution and professional development. In this role I focus on supporting scholars and teachers so they can do their best work.
Previously, I was Associate Professor of English and the Director for the Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware. I made my way to UD via the JFK Institute of North American Studies in Berlin, Germany, where I was an Assistant Professor.
Before I did my graduate work in English (PhD, Princeton University; MA, University of Chicago), I studied “stuff” from a very different perspective. I worked in material sciences and made prosthetic limbs for amputees. Writing about fiction might seem like a far cry from that line of work, but my interests in materiality and in loss are a through-line.
You can follow this through-line in my first monograph entitled The Death of Things: Ephemera and the American Novel, which was published by The University of Minnesota Press in October 2020 and reviewed in The Nation.
More generally, I teach and research 20th and 21st century American literature, material culture studies, critical theory (especially psychoanalysis), and media studies (with a focus on digital artifacts and culture).
My scholarly work appears in PMLA, Contemporary Literature, Post45, American Literary History, The Journal of American Studies, Literature Compass, ASAP/J, and numerous edited volumes. I am co-editor of the American Literary History book series for Oxford University Press.
Since I’m committed to speaking to a broader public, I also publish in venues such as Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and Inside Higher Ed. And I am one of the hosts of the podcast Novel Dialogue.
Education
B.A. Kenyon College
M.A. University of Chicago
Ph.D. Princeton University
Publications
Books
The Death of Things: Ephemera and the American Novel. University of Minnesota Press, October 2020.
Modelwork: The Material Culture of Making and Knowing. Co-edited with Martin Brückner and Sandy Isenstadt. University of Minnesota Press, October 2021.
Cultures of Obsolescence: History, Materiality and the Digital Age. Co-edited and with an introduction by Babette Tischleder and Sarah Wasserman. Palgrave MacMillan, 2015.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
"Lost and Found: Alien as Object, Unconscious as Method." American Literary History, November 2024.
"Critical Dogs/Critical Darlings: What Contemporary Criticism Doesn't Want." American Literary History, May 2022. Winner of the 1921 Prize for Best Essay in American Literature in 2022.
"Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes and The Persistence of Urban Forms." PMLA 135.3, May 2020. Winner of the 2020 William Riley Parker Prize.
"Thing Theory." Oxford University Press Online Bibliographies, June 2020.
"The Contemporary: A State of the Field Essay." Co-authored with Emily Hyde. Literature Compass. September 2017.
"Looking Away from 9/11: The Optics of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland." Contemporary Literature. Volume 55, Number 2. Summer 2014. 249-269.
"Ephemeral Gods and Billboard Saints: Don DeLillo's Underworld and Urban Apparitions." Journal of American Studies. Volume 48, Number 4. Fall 2014. 1041-1067.
Book Chapters
"Representation." In The Cambridge University Press Handbook of Material Culture Studies. Eds. Lu Ann De Cunzo and Catherine Dann Roeber. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
"Cloud-Reading with John Durham Peters." In Culture2. Edited by Frank Kelleter and Alexander Starre. Transcript Verlag, 2022.
"Afterword: On the Humility of Models." In Modelwork: Material Culture and Modeling in the Humanities. Co-edited with Martin Brückner and Sandy Isenstadt. University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
"Refuse, Refuge, Relic." In Fugitive Archives. Eds. Martin Brückner and Sandy Isenstadt. University of Delaware Press, 2021.
"'And things were looking like a movie': Suburban Chic and the 1980s." In On Style: Collected Essays. Eds. Jasmin Dücker, Olga Tarapata, and Eleana Vaja. Routledge, 2020.
"The Menace of the New: Mourning the world of tomorrow at the 1939 New York World's Fair." New York, New York: Urban Spaces, Dreamscapes, Contested Territories. Peter Lang, 2016.
Public Writing and Online Publications
"The Best Reason to Major in English," Inside Higher Ed, November 2023.
Editor and Contributor to "Hard/Soft/Lost: The Edges of Contemporary Culture," a cluster on the ASAP/J website, May 2023.
"What Makes a Millennial," Los Angeles Review of Books, August 2022.
"Bo Burnham's Big Millennial Energy," Public Books, December 2021.
"Who Needs to See This (Again)?: On Raoul Peck's Exterminate All the Brutes, an essay with Grégory Pierrot. ASAP/J, October 2021.
Books in Conversation: Dan Sinykin and Sarah Wasserman, ASAP, December 2020.
"B-Sides: Brecht Evens's The Making Of," Public Books, June 2020.
"Multiplayer Lit/Multiplayer Crit," in "Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism," Post45, September 2019.
"The Return of the Return of the Repressed," Los Angeles Review of Books. April 2019.
Editor and Contributor to "How We Write (Well)," a cluster on the Post45 Website. January 2019.
Co-curator of Thing Theory and Literary Studies, Stanford Arcade Colloquy.
"My Problem with OOO or, Reflections on a McNugget," Stanford Arcade. June 2018.
"Digital Intimacies: Slow Fish in a Swift Sea," Flaunt Magazine, August 2018.
"The Quest for Eternal Youth," Flaunt Magazine, November 2017.
"What's Old in New America," Flaunt Magazine, September 2017.
Contact