Sara Pfaff specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century American literature, multi-ethnic U.S. literatures and science and medicine in literature, with an emphasis on issues of race and ethnicity. She studies how discourses of contagion and infection reflect and dissect broader social anxieties regarding contact, identity, and exchange. Her interdisciplinary approach to her teaching and research is influenced by critical race, ethnic, and Indigenous studies; postcolonial and transnational studies; democratic theory and political thought; and science and technology studies.
Dr. Pfaff earned her Ph.D. from Brown University, and has held teaching appointments both there as well as Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is currently completing a book studying the prevalence of illness in contemporary Afro- and Native American fiction, and the ways in which sickly identities offer alternatives to conventional models of communal affiliation and organizing. She has also begun another comparatist…
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Sara Pfaff specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century American literature, multi-ethnic U.S. literatures and science and medicine in literature, with an emphasis on issues of race and ethnicity. She studies how discourses of contagion and infection reflect and dissect broader social anxieties regarding contact, identity, and exchange. Her interdisciplinary approach to her teaching and research is influenced by critical race, ethnic, and Indigenous studies; postcolonial and transnational studies; democratic theory and political thought; and science and technology studies.
Dr. Pfaff earned her Ph.D. from Brown University, and has held teaching appointments both there as well as Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is currently completing a book studying the prevalence of illness in contemporary Afro- and Native American fiction, and the ways in which sickly identities offer alternatives to conventional models of communal affiliation and organizing. She has also begun another comparatist work studying the rhetoric of self-determination, from its promulgation in the work of Harry Haywood and D’Arcy McNickle to its emanation in radical social justice movements before considering its appropriation by white revanchist and neoliberal discourses.
At Kenyon, she teaches courses on medicine in literature, Native American Literatures, postnationalist American literatures, and multi-ethnic science fiction.
Areas of Expertise
20th and 21st-century multi-ethnic U.S. literatures; critical race and indigenous studies; science and medicine in literature.
Education
2018 — Doctor of Philosophy from Brown University
2010 — Master of Arts from Brown University
2008 — Bachelor of Arts from Wayne State University, summa cum laude
Courses Recently Taught
ENGL 103
Introduction to Literature and Language
ENGL 103
Each section of these first-year seminars approaches the study of literature through the exploration of a single theme in texts drawn from a variety of literary genres (such as tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, epic, novel, short story, film and autobiography) and historical periods. Classes are small, offering intensive discussion and close attention to each student's writing. Students in each section are asked to work intensively on composition as part of a rigorous introduction to reading, thinking, speaking and writing about literary texts. During the semester, instructors will assign frequent essays and may also require oral presentations, quizzes, examinations and research projects. This course is not open to juniors and seniors without permission of the department chair. Offered every year.
ENGL 104
Introduction to Literature and Language
ENGL 104
Each section of these first-year seminars approaches the study of literature through the exploration of a single theme in texts drawn from a variety of literary genres (such as tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, epic, novel, short story, film and autobiography) and historical periods. Classes are small, offering intensive discussion and close attention to each student's writing. Students in each section are asked to work intensively on composition as part of a rigorous introduction to reading, thinking, speaking and writing about literary texts. During the semester, instructors will assign frequent essays and may also require oral presentations, quizzes, examinations and research projects. This course is not open to juniors and seniors without permission of department chair. Offered every year.
ENGL 291
ST: Feeling Haunted Am Fiction
ENGL 291
ENGL 383
Unlearning Native America
ENGL 383
An introduction to the field of Native American studies, this interdisciplinary course critically examines an array of cultural expression by contemporary Native writers, filmmakers, visual artists and performers. While the course emphasizes the way Native people represent themselves, we begin with the powerful stereotypes of Native Americans that continue to circulate (hence, the unlearning aspect of the course), then look to the ways Native artists and writers appropriate, refute, and rewrite these images. As we read, screen and listen, we all attend to the political, regional and tribal contexts informing these works, through supplementary reading in history, political science, gender studies and other disciplines. Key critical issues will include nation and sovereignty, indigenous feminism and two-spirit traditions, displacement and community, and the role of humor. Texts to be studied may include "Storyteller" by Leslie Marmon Silko, "Bad Indians" by Deborah Miranda, "When My Brother Was an Aztec" by Natalie Diaz, such films as "Reel Injun," "Smoke Signals," and "The Fast Runner", and work by such visual and performing artists as the 1491s, Steven Paul Judd, and Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith. This counts toward the approaches to literary study or the post-1900 requirements for the major. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or permission of instructor.
ENGL 391
ST: Ethnic Futurisms
ENGL 391
ENGL 391
ST: Postmodernity & Pathology
ENGL 391
ENGL 391
ST:Postmodernity & Pathology
ENGL 391
Academic & Scholarly Achievements
2015
“‘The slack string is just a slack string’: Neoformalist Networks in The White Boy Shuffle.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, vol. 26, no. 2, 2015. pp. 106-127.