Associate ProfessorSarah Gleeson-White

I am an Associate Professor in American Literature in the Discipline of English and Writing. My scholarship lies in late 19th- through early 20th-century U.S. literary and film history, with particular interests in Black literary history, print culture, film-and-literature, regionalism, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, Wallace Thurman, Carson McCullers, Oscar Micheaux, and modernism, especially what modernist studies might omit.

My most recent book is Silent Film and the Formations of US Literary Culture: Literature in Motion (Oxford UP 2024), which considers the interactions of the literary and motion-picture industries across the silent-film period. I have published widely on William Faulkner and Hollywood, including William Faulkner at Twentieth Century-Fox (Oxford UP, 2017) and articles in PMLA and elsewhere. I am also the co-editor, with Pardis Dabashi, of The New William Faulkner Studies (Cambridge UP, 2022). Other scholarship includes articles and book chapters about the motion-picture engagements of Willa Cather, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Charles Chesnutt and Hamlin Garland, as well as book chapters about what I term "motion-picture print culture" in The Routledge Handbook to American Film History, ed. Massood and Wojcik (Routledge, 2025) and The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and Film, ed. Jordan Brower (Cambridge UP, forthcoming).

My current project is about 1920s author Wallace Thurman: a book, Wallace Thurman, 1922-1934: Black Authorship and Print Culture Between the Wars; an article  (PMLA January 2026) about a recent discovery in the Thurman Papers in Yale's Beinecke Library; and a series of essays about Black little magazines.

My scholarship, which is largely archive-based, is supported by Huntington Library fellowships, a Yale University Beinecke Library Fellowship, American Philosophical Society Franklin grants, a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship, the University of Oxford's Centre for Life Writing, and University of Groningen Research fellowships. I have served on the editorial boards of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, The Faulkner Journal, and The Journal of American Studies and, with Jessica Masters, co-edited the Book Reviews section of The Space Between Journal.