Greetings! My name is Sarah Coogan, and I am a writer, literary scholar, and educator. I am the Associate Director for North America of the David Jones Research Center and a seminar leader for the Catherine Project, and I hold a Ph.D. in English from the University of Notre Dame.
My work focuses mainly on twentieth-century literature, particularly global modernisms, poetics, and religion and literature. I am fascinated by how writers imagine their identities in the present by narrating their relationship to the past. I believe that the beauty of the written word can draw us into community and form us intellectually, morally, and spiritually.
My first book, Nostalgia and National Identity in the British and Irish Modernist Epic (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, December 2025) reveals how modernist poets harness nostalgia to redefine their national identities and disrupt exclusionary accounts of cultural heritage.
For more information about my research and teaching, you can peruse the site or read my CV.
Status
Reading: Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon; Katherine Arden’s The Unicorn Hunters.
Writing: Drafting a fantasy novel and writing a chapter on Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland for an edited volume. Also, the newsletter.
Baking/Cooking: Lots of sandwich bread, because my son only wants to eat jam sandwiches
Listening: Paris Paloma’s “Miyazaki” and Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.” And lots of podcasts about The Office (US).
Sarah E. Coogan 