Sarah Knott is Sally M. Reahard Professor of History and a Research Fellow of the Kinsey Institute. She is the author or editor of four books including Mother Is A Verb: An Unconventional History which was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux in New York and Penguin Viking in London and translated into five languages. Research for Sensibility and the American Revolution was awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Omohundro Institute. Her most recent book is Mothering’s Many Labours, co-edited with Emma Griffin. Her essays and commentary have appeared in the William & Mary Quarterly, the American Historical Review and Past & Present, as well as in the Guardian, TLS, LARB, and BBC History Magazine.
Knott is a British-born feminist, writer and historian whose research focuses on the Atlantic world and United States since the seventeenth century. She earned a DPhil and BA from Oxford University and an MA from the University of Pennsylvania as a Thouron Scholar. Her writing and scholarship primarily focus on intersectional histories of gender, subjectivity and experience. She seeks to understand the most intimate and various dimensions of large- and small-scale change. Mother Is A Verb explores what story can be told from the textual shards that remain about experiences of pregnancy, birth and the encounter with an infant. Essays on the age of revolutions seek to understand narratives and the witnessing of revolutionary transformation, or explore what can be done with a historical fragment.
Knott has a particular interest in forms of writing and its craft. She has served as both Associate and Acting Editor of the American Historical Review, the American historical profession’s flagship journal. In 2013, she was elected to the Editorial Board of the UK’s Past & Present. She is a member of the Archival Fragments, Experimental Modes Collective, and cowriting a volume under that title.
Future planned projects include a co-edited volume on care and capitalism in the twentieth century; a cultural history of the Age of Revolutions; a community-university archival project entitled "Lineages of Birth" and the book-length Middle Care with the support of the Kinsey Institute.
The College of Arts + Sciences