Sarah E. Coogan

Greetings! My name is Sarah Coogan, and I am a writer, literary scholar, and educator. For the 2025–2026 academic year, I am a visitor at the School of Historical Studies of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ. 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. My next book, tentatively titled The Shield of Achilles: Religion, Myth, and the Representation of Violence in Transatlantic Modernist Poetry, will explore how Anglophone modernist poets from Africa, the British Isles, and the Caribbean deploy religious and mythic imagery to depict experiences of violence.

For more information about my research and teaching, you can peruse the site or read my CV.