Welcoming Sarah Wasserman, Assistant Dean for Faculty Affairs

Dear colleagues, 

I am excited to announce that Sarah Wasserman will join the Arts and Sciences academic leadership team in August in the newly created staff position of assistant dean for faculty affairs. 

In this new role, Sarah will serve as an impartial resource for faculty in supporting a range of areas, including mentoring and conflict resolution. She will also work closely with Michelle Warren, our senior advisor for faculty development, diversity, and inclusion, to build community through faculty orientation and professional development programming. Additionally, Sarah will coordinate and serve as the central point of contact for Arts and Sciences academic policies, procedures, and resources such as the Faculty Handbook.

An accomplished academic administrator and scholar of 20th- and 21st-century American literature, Sarah currently serves as an associate professor of English at the University of Delaware, where she also directs the Center for Material Culture Studies. She brings valuable experience with faculty development, including leadership of working groups on topics addressing inequity and inclusion as well as the first-ever Title IX/gender equity workshop for the University of Delaware English Department. Her interest in faculty affairs stems from her understanding that advocacy and support enable scholars and teachers to do their best work.

Sarah's teaching and research focus on American literature, material culture studies, critical theory, media studies, and critical race studies. Among her many honors, she received the University of Delaware College of Arts and Sciences 2022 Faculty Excellence Award in Advisement. Sarah's first monograph, The Death of Things: Ephemera and the American Novel, received an honorable mention for the Modernist Studies Association's First Book Prize, was shortlisted for Arizona State University's Institute for Humanities Research 2022 Book Award, and was lauded in The Nation.

Sarah's scholarly work can also be found in numerous co-edited volumes and in top academic publications such as PMLA, Contemporary Literature, American Literary History, Post45, and the Journal of American Studies. Sarah has also authored many articles and reviews with the broader public in mind in such outlets as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and Inside Higher Education. She co-curates the Thing Theory and Literary Studies colloquy on Arcade, a website hosted by the Stanford Humanities Center, and is a regular host of the podcast Novel Dialogue.

Prior to joining the University of Delaware, Sarah served as an assistant professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies in Berlin, Germany. She earned her PhD at Princeton University and her master's degree at the University of Chicago. Before completing her graduate work in English, Sarah worked in material sciences and made prosthetic limbs for amputees—work that she considers a "throughline" to her academic interests in materiality and loss.

Sarah will begin her new role on August 1. Opportunities to meet her will be announced this summer and fall. I hope you will join me in welcoming Sarah to Dartmouth!

With best wishes, 

Elizabeth F. Smith
Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences