Sarah Chinn

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 Narratives of the Civil War. 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, 2009),  and Spectacular Men: Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early American Stage, 1780-1830 (Oxford University Press, 2017), which won the 2017 Theatre Library Association George Freedley Memorial Award for an exemplary work in the field of live theatre or performance. She has published articles in GLQ, Signs, WSQ, American Literature and other journals, and in 2020 won the American Literature Society's 1921 Prize for the best essay in American literary study. She is currently working on a book about the representation of amputation during and after the Civil War.

For details about Prof. Chinn's publications and other scholarly work, you can go to her page on the CUNY Commons.