While we often think of literature, film, and television as places we can escape the realities of the world, in fact the norms of gender that we live by are reflected in and reproduced by cultural products. In this talk, Sarah E. Chinn shows the ways that literary and other imaginative materials fit into historical and regional concepts of gender.
She’ll be asking and trying to answer several questions, including:
Sarah E. Chinn teaches American Literatures and Cultures in the English Department at Hunter College, CUNY. 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 Post-1945 Queer Narratives.
She is the author of
She is the winner of the 2018 George Freedley Memorial Award for an exemplary work in the field of live theatre or performance, awarded by the Theatre Library Association and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title.
She was awarded the American Literature Society’s 1921 Prize for best article in American literature in 2020.
Her most recent book is Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction (Cambridge University Press, 2024).