Rate My Professor Sarah Gleeson-White

Sarah Gleeson-White is Associate Professor in the Department of English within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney. She earned her BA and MSc from the University of Edinburgh and her PhD from the University of New South Wales. Her research specializations encompass late 19th- and early 20th-century American literature, early American cinema, US literature and film, and African American studies. Gleeson-White's scholarship explores intersections between literary texts and cinematic forms, particularly during the silent film era and interwar periods. Her current project examines Wallace Thurman and interwar Black literary culture, supported by a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society.

Gleeson-White is the author of two monographs: Strange Bodies: Gender and Identity in the Novels of Carson McCullers (University of Alabama Press, 2003), which analyzes gender and identity in McCullers's fiction, and William Faulkner at Twentieth Century-Fox: The Annotated Screenplays (Oxford University Press, 2017), providing annotated editions of Faulkner's Hollywood screenplays. She co-edited The New William Faulkner Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2022) with Peter Lurie, featuring essays on Faulkner's oeuvre. Her forthcoming book, Silent Film and the Formations of U.S. Literary Culture: Literature in Motion (Oxford University Press, 2024), investigates interactions between US literature and silent cinema. Key articles include 'Revisiting the Southern Grotesque: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Case of Carson McCullers' (2001, 92 citations), 'A Peculiarly Southern Form of Ugliness: Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor' (2003, 60 citations), and 'Auditory Exposures: Faulkner, Eisenstein, and Film Sound' (2013). She has published in journals such as PMLA, Modernism/Modernity, Los Angeles Review of Books, and contributed to The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South and William Faulkner in Context. Gleeson-White received the University of Sydney Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Mentoring Award and funding through the Faculty Collaborative Research Scheme for the Sydney American Cultures Workshop, which she co-convenes. She teaches courses on American literature and cinema, supervises postgraduate research, and engages in public scholarship through platforms like The Conversation.