Sarah Faulkner (she/her/hers)

I focus on Romanticism, 18/19C, Women’s Writing, Scottish Studies, and Book History, and hold a Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies. My dissertation, “Jane Porter in the Margins: Paratext in the Romantic National Novel,” studies Jane Porter’s novel The Scottish Chiefs (1810) as a case study of Romantic female authorship in which Porter asserts women’s power to shape conceptions of national identity. I argue that she uses paratext to assert authority over national and historical topics usually barred to female novelists, and that while critics have dismissed her novel as inaccurate and sentimental, this emotion is a key source of her political power as a female narrator of history. While Porter presented a modest feminine authorial persona to her public, my archival and bibliographical study reveals a politically engaged woman writer seeking to serve her nation from the margins.

I also study 18/19C women's autobiographies, letters, manuscripts, and afterlives, along with Romantic celebrity culture and authorship networks, focusing on Jane Austen, Jane Porter, Sydney Owenson, Germaine de Staël, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Mary Hays, and Lady Caroline Lamb. 

I have taught literature courses on The Age of Romanticism, British Literature 1700-1900, The Rise of the English Novel, as well as writing courses on Harry Potter, Jane Austen, and Witches & Monsters in Fiction. Outside of my teaching, I am the Program Manager for Humanities Washington and also give public-facing talks on my research. I have recently presented for the UW Alumni Association, Gothic Women Project, and Celtic Arts Foundation.