Courses Taught: Victorian Literature, Intro to Women's Literature, Literary Form and Analysis, Critical Writing English, Writing About Literature
Biography:
Sara Atwood teaches literature and writing at Portland State University and Pacific Northwest College of Art. She also leads Delve Readers’ Seminars for Portland Literary Arts (recent seminar topics include Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, The Brothers Karamazov, Middlemarch, Hilary Mantel, and Marilynne Robinson). Her academic work has been published in Nineteenth-Century Prose, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, and Carlyle Studies Annual. She is the author of Ruskin’s Educational Ideals (Routledge 2011) and has contributed essays to a number of books and journals. She has lectured widely on John Ruskin, both in the US and abroad, focusing particularly on education, the environment, and language. She is co-director of the Ruskin Society of North America and a board member of the Ruskin Art Club of Los Angeles.
Although her research focus is Ruskin and Victorian studies, she enjoys the opportunity to teach a wide range of literature, including contemporary work, and encourages students to draw connections across periods, cultures, and genres. She also studies visual art and often incorporates paintings, film, and other media in her literature and writing classes.
Selected Publications:
- Ruskin’s Educational Ideals. Ashgate, 2011.
- “Legacies: Morris in the Twenty-First Century.” Cambridge Companion to William Morris. Francis O’Gorman, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, Forthcoming 2023.
- “‘Over-hopefulness and getting-on-ness’: Ruskin, Nature, and America.” Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, No. 91. Spring 2020.
- “‘The Assumption of the Dragon’: Ruskin’s Mythic Vision.” Victorian Environmental Nightmares. Eds. Lawrence Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
- “‘This link between the earth and man’: Ruskin, Nature, and Education.” William Morris and John Ruskin. Ed. John Blewitt. University of Exeter Press, 2019.
- “‘An enormous difference between knowledge and education’: What Ruskin Can Teach Us.” John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education: Essays in Honour of Dinah Birch. Ed. Valerie Purton. Anthem, 2018.
- “‘Syllable by syllable’: Ruskin and the Art of Language.” The Ruskin Review and Bulletin. Vol. 13, No. 2 (Autumn 2017). 39-51.
- “The Past as Persistent Presence: Teaching Victorian Non-Fiction Today.” Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century. Eds. Jennifer Cadwallader and Lawrence Mazzeno. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
- “‘Do you, good reader, know good style when you get it?’: Learning to read with Ruskin.” Nineteenth-Century Prose. Special issue on Victorian literary critics. Ed. Lawrence Mazzeno. Vol. 43, Nos. 1/2. (Spring/Fall 2016). 263-282.
- “‘A pile of feathers’: Valuing Education in a Market Society.” Ruskin Review and Bulletin. Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring 2015). 26-38.
- “‘The earth veil’: Ruskin and Environment.” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies. Vol. 24 (Spring 2015). 5-24.
- “‘Leading human souls to what is best’: Carlyle, Ruskin and Hero-Worship.” On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (Thomas Carlyle). Ed. David R. Sorensen and Brent E. Kinser. Rethinking the Western Tradition (Series). New Haven: Yale UP, 2013. 247-259.