Sarah Chinn received her Ph.D in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 1996.

Her work primarily explores questions of race, sexuality, and gender in U.S. literature and culture, particularly in the 19th century. She teaches a wide range of courses from Nineteenth Century Women Writers to Early American Drama to Literary Theory to Multicultural American Literature. She is the author of Technology and the Logic of American Racism: A Cultural History of the Body as Evidence (Continuum, 2000) and  The Invention of Modern Adolescence: Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America (Rutgers University Press, 2008).  She is currently working on two book-length projects: Spectacular Men: Early American Drama and National Masculinity, 1780-1830, and Feeling Our Way: The Ethics of Lesbian Writing.

Her recent publications include an article on Audre Lorde in GLQ, on lesbian sexuality and exoticism in the collection Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness (Columbia University Press, 2002), and on the Hull-House Labor Museum in the collection Our Sisters' Keepers: American Women Writers and Poverty Relief (University of Alabama Press, 2005).

Professor Chinn is currently Executive Director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the CUNY Graduate Center.

This semester, Fall 2010, Prof. Chinn is teaching English 385.63, "Heroic Masculinity Before the Civil War."  For the syllabus, click on the link at left.