Sara Marcus

Assistant Professor
132675, Gender Studies; Associate Editor, Journal of Popular Music Studies
English

Research Interests

American and African American literature, 19th century-present; popular music, performance, and sound studies; gender and sexuality studies; creative writing, especially nonfiction and criticism

Related Courses Taught

Sound Studies, Popular Music, and American Literature; Political Disappointment and Disillusion in 20th-Century US Culture; Feminist and Queer Literary Criticism; American Literary Traditions II

Biography

Sara Marcus is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where she is also affiliated with the Gender Studies program. Marcus specializes in American and African American literature, popular music, sound, and performance from the 19th century through the present. She is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Popular Music Studies. Her current book project, Political Disappointment: A Partial History (under advance contract with Harvard University Press), argues that the defining American texts of the twentieth century are records of disappointment. Bringing together an interdisciplinary archive that runs from Reconstruction’s aftermath through the AIDS crisis, this book tells a new cultural history of the century. Its archive of disappointment throws into sharp relief the role of nonfulfillment as a central element of the twentieth century—and indeed of America itself. Marcus’s first book, Girls to the Front (Harper Perennial, 2010), a critical and cultural history of the 1990s punk-feminist movement Riot Grrrl, was a National Award for Arts Writing finalist and is currently in its tenth printing. Marcus is also the author of “Time Enough, but None to Spare: The Indispensable Temporalities of Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition” (American Literature, 2019), which was nominated for multiple prizes in American literature. Her essays and criticism on art, music, literature, and politics have recently appeared in critical venues such as Artforum, Bookforum, and Texte zur Kunst; academic-adjacent forums such as Public Books, Post45, Dissent, and the Los Angeles Review of Books; and mainstream publications including the New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and CNN.com.