Sarah Gracombe

Professor Sarah Gracombe, English

Associate Professor of English

Ph.D., Columbia University, 2005
B.A., Brown University

E-mail: sgracombe@stonehill.edu
Phone: (508) 565-1705
Office: Cushing-Martin, 132

Sarah Gracombe teaches classes that explore nineteenth-century British literature and culture from a variety of perspectives. Her interests include the novel, the construction of national identity, and Victorian representations of race, religion, gender, and psychology. In particular, her research explores why Victorian novels so often employ representations of Jewishness in order to articulate--and challenge--ideas of Englishness.

She earned her B.A. in English and Art History from Brown University and her Ph.D. from Columbia University, where she received a Whiting Fellowship, a Marjorie Hope Nicholson Fellowship, and a doctoral grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. Most recently, she has been named a Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies for 2010-2011. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Nineteenth-Century Literature, Prooftexts, and Literature Compass. She is currently finishing a manuscript entitled Novel Converts: Cultural Englishness and Victorian Jewishness.

Prof. Gracombe is also the faculty advisor to the English Society, with whom she organizes the annual Undergraduate Literature Conference with Bridgewater State College.

Courses Taught:

  • Fallen Women & Typewriter Girls: The Genders of British Literature, 1792-1929
  • Fictions of Englishness
  • The Nineteenth-Century British Novel
  • The Novel and Psychology, 1800-1920
  • Jane Austen: 1775-2008
  • Taking the Victorians to the Movies
  • The Victorian Novel
  • Americans Abroad
  • Writing the Nation: The English Novel and National Identity, 1800-2000
  • Narrating Self and Society (Honors)
  • Fiction
  • Introduction to Literary Studies 
  •  Rebels With(out) a Cause
  • Literary Transformations from Ovid to Auden
  • Extreme Makeovers