Overview
Sarah is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation of Ojibwe (Bear Clan) and a 6th year PhD Candidate in the Medieval Studies Program, a graduate minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies, and a PhD member of Cornell’s Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies.
Positioned at the intersection of critical Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and early English studies, Sarah’s research takes a place-based approach to understanding the legacies of settler colonialism. Her dissertation’s archive consists of nineteenth-century settler documentations of New York State (e.g., paintings, journals, early local histories, maps and surveys, etc.) with Old English and Latin sources from early medieval England to show how the rhetorics of dispossession are being developed in early medieval England and adapted in New York State contexts.
While at Cornell, Sarah has been awarded the Summer Graduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities (2024), the Zhu Family Graduate Fellowship (2023-24), and the Dean’s McNair Fellowship (2019), and named a Graduate Dean’s Scholar (2019). They have also been awarded the Scholar of the College Award (2019) and the Art History Book Award (2019) from the University of Minnesota–Morris.
Research Focus
- Critical Indigenous studies
- Medieval-modern legacies of settler colonialism
- Literature and material culture of early medieval England
- 19th-century medievalism, Anglo-Saxonism, & rhetorics of Indigenous Erasure
- Premodern critical race studies
- Landscape studies
Courses taught:
Indigenous North America (Fall 2021/Fall2022, Graduate TA)
- Women in Medieval Art and Literature (Fall 2020)
Publications
- with Jordan Chauncy. “Settler Fantasies and Queer Disruptions: A Nonbinary Reading of Gerald’s Wolves,” invited contribution to “Medieval Trans Natures,” ed. Aylin Malcolm and Nat Rivkin. Special Issue, Medieval Ecocriticisms 4 (2024): 17-38.
with Dusti C. Bridges, “Anglo-Saxonism and Indigenous Dispossession: Land-Grab Universities and the Emergence of Medieval Studies,” in the Medieval Academy of America’s centennial Special Issue of Speculum, ed. Roland Betancourt and Karla Mallette, (Forthcoming January 2025).
Submitted: with Tarren Andrews, Emily Bange, Christopher Fletcher, Haley Guepet, Alexis Howlett, Alex Lee, Veronica Mendali, Natalie Robertson, and Benjamin Weil, “Reflections on ‘Thinking and Working Beyond the Medieval Archive,’” in Beyond Medieval Archives, ed. Carl Kears and Fran Brooks.