Sarah Jane Kerwin ’15

Biography

Sarah Jane Kerwin is a literary scholar specializing in ecocriticism and 20th-century American literature, with emphasis on interconnections among the U.S. West, settler colonialism, and the environment. She explores these ideas with students in a range of genres—including lyric poetry, essay collections, climate fiction, and film—with an eye on the many different ways the U.S. has been rendered as a place and an environment in literature.

Kerwin is strongly committed to canon and syllabus diversification, structuring courses so that students think critically about why we read what we read: She teaches indigenous perspectives on the U.S. National Park System alongside John Muir’s nature writing, foregrounds queerly ecological voices, and directly addresses place-based systemic racism through texts such as Ann Petry’s The Street and Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House.

Kerwin’s pedagogy-focused article “Reimagining the West In/And the First-Year Writing Course” was published in Western American Literature in 2022. Her book project, Coming and Going to Know a Place: Transience in Literature of the U.S. West, focuses on temporary place relationships in western literature, arguing that movement and impermanence invite unique forms of environmentalism.

She is an avid traveler, runner, and coffee drinker; her perfect day would include all three.