Sarah Winter

Professor

Comparative Literary & Cultural Studies

Education

Ph.D. Yale University, Comparative Literature

B.A. University of California, Berkeley, Comparative Literature

Areas of Expertise

Nineteenth-century British literature and cultural history; comparative studies in the novel; human rights, law, and literature; rhetoric; the history of the modern disciplines; Darwin studies; Freud studies

Bio:

Sarah Winter is the author of The Pleasures of Memory: Learning to Read with Charles Dickens (Fordham UP, 2011) andFreud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge (Stanford UP, 1999). In Spring semester 2012, she held the UConn Human Rights Institute Faculty Fellowship to work on a book project titled “A Test of Sovereignty: The Novel, Habeas Corpus, and Human Rights.” This project examines personifications of the political prisoner and the fugitive slave in Anglo-American habeas corpus jurisprudence, abolitionist writings, and the novel, in order to trace the formulation of modern legal conceptions of human rights in the long nineteenth century. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Victorian Studies, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Cultural Critique, and Comparative Literature Studies, and she won the North American Victorian Studies Association’s Donald Gray Prize for the best article in Victorian studies from 2009 for “Darwin’s Saussure: Biosemiotics and Race in Expression,” published in Representations. Her recent teaching includes courses in Victorian literature, classical rhetoric, the modern novel, and literature and human rights. Recent lectures include invited talks at the University of Zürich and the University of Cologne, and panel presentations at conferences organized by the Society for Novel Studies, the North American Victorian Studies Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, and the Dickens Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is also Co-Director of the Graduate Program in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies and organizer of the faculty study group on Refugees, Narratives, and Media for the Research Program on Humanitarianism at the UConn Human Rights Institute.