Senior Teaching Professor and Director, Writing Center
- PhD, Tufts University, English
- MA, Tufts University, English
- BA, Barnard College, English and Italian
Sara Hasselbach came to USD in 2015 after receiving a Ph.D. in English from Tufts University, where she taught literature and writing classes. She serves as the Director of the Writing Center and teaches courses in the English Department, the LLC program, and the Humanities Center. Her classes include general literature surveys, courses on literature of the English Renaissance, and more content-specific courses on single authors (Toni Morrison) or texts (Shakespeare’s King Lear).
Areas of Expertise
Dr. Hasselbach’s research centers on religious poets of the English Renaissance; in particular, she focuses on identity formation by poets such as Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Lanyer, and Milton. She has a secondary interest in Shakespeare and received a summer fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study King Lear at the University of Chicago in 2017. Other central research and teaching interests include Chaucer, female medieval mysticism, affect theory, and visual culture.