Dr Sarah Sharp

Lecturer in Scottish Literature

Researcher profile

Email

ses42@st-andrews.ac.uk

Office

Room 201

Location

Kennedy Hall

 

Biography

Sarah Sharp completed her doctoral studies at the University of Edinburgh in 2016. She has held positions as a Leverhulme Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Otago, working within the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, and an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin. She was selected for a Fulbright Scottish Studies Scholar Award in 2018 and was based at the University of South Carolina.  After six years as a Lecturer in Scottish Literature and the Deputy Director of the Research Institute for Irish and Scottish Studies at Aberdeen, she joined the University of St Andrews in 2026.

Research areas

Sarah's research focus is on Scottish Literature of the long nineteenth century with a particular emphasis on Scotland's global connections. She has published articles on James Hogg, shipboard diaries, Robert Burns, crime fiction and settler colonialism. Her first book Kirkyard Romanticism: Death, Modernity and Scottish Literature in the Nineteenth Century was published by Edinburgh University Press in September 2024. 

Sarah is an editor of the Routledge Companion to Scottish Literature and is co-editing a volume in the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott's Poetry.
Her latest research considers ideas of 'Cottage Scottishness' in the context of Empire. 

Selected publications

• The Settler Colonial Cotter: Situating 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' in Post-Revolutionary America

  Sharp, S., Mar 2025, In: Burns Chronicle. 134, 1, p. 3-24

  Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

• Kirkyard Romanticism: Death, Modernity and Scottish Literature in the Nineteenth Century

  Sharp, S., 2024, EDINBURGH UNIV PRESS.

  Research output: Book/Report › Book

• Open access

  A club of “murder-fanciers”: Thomas De Quincey’s essays “On Murder” and consuming violence in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine

  Sharp, S., 2023, In: Nineteenth-Century Contexts. 45, 5, p. 445-462 18 p.

  Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

• Open access

  Exporting 'the cotter's saturday night': Robert burns, scottish romantic nationalism and colonial settler identity

  Sharp, S., Apr 2019, In: Romanticism. 25, 1, p. 81-89 9 p.

  Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

• 'Your vocation is marriage': Systematic colonisation, the marriage plot and finding home in Catherine helen Spence's Clara Morison (1854)

  Sharp, S., Mar 2019, In: Scottish Literary Review. 11, 1, p. 27-45 19 p.

  Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

• A Death in the Cottage: Spiritual and Economic Improvement in Romantic-Era Scottish Death Narratives

  Sharp, S., 17 Apr 2018, Cultures of Improvement in Scottish Romanticism, 1707–1840. Routledge, p. 213-232

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• A place to mourn? Emotion, genre, and child death in the Lady Egidia shipboard diaries

  Sharp, S., 1 Jun 2018, In: Victorians. 133, p. 30-43 14 p.

  Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

• Hogg's Murder of Ravens: Storytelling, Community and Posthumous Mutilation

  Sharp, S., 1 Oct 2013, In: Studies in Hogg and his World. 23

  Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

 

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