B.A. 2003 The University of Michigan
Ph.D. 2012 Cornell University
On the PSU faculty since 2012

FIELDS: American literature; ecocriticism; queer theory

BIOGRAPHY: Sarah Ensor received her B.A. in English from the University of Michigan and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Cornell University. Her research and teaching interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, ecocriticism, environmental rhetoric and politics, queer theory, and American literary regionalism. She is currently at work on a manuscript entitled Spinster Ecology: Rethinking Relation in the American Literary Environment, which considers how the figure of the spinster – and a spinsterly literary aesthetic – can help both to identify and to remedy the theoretical impasses that currently divide queer theory from ecocriticism. An excerpt from this project was published in the ecocriticism special issue of American Literature (June 2012) as “Spinster Ecology: Rachel Carson, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Nonreproductive Futurity.” Another essay, “Terminal Regions: Queer Ecocriticism at the End,” which reads contemporary environmentalism's treatment of planetary terminality alongside Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's writing on terminal illness and American literary regionalism's status as a terminal genre, has been accepted for inclusion in the forthcoming collection Against Life, co-edited by PSU's own Alastair Hunt.

Before coming to PSU, Ensor taught at Cornell University, the University of Michigan's New England Literature Program, Phillips Academy (Andover), and The Loomis Chaffee School. She couldn't be more delighted to now call Portland home.