Dr Sarah Haggarty, Queens'
sh267@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
Sarah is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of English. She is also Director of Studies in English, Lecturer, and Fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge.
Sarah works on long-eighteenth-century British writing, visual art, and culture, and has a special interest in the intersections of literary and cultural studies, art history, philosophy, theology, and anthropology. She has written about theories of gift-giving and exchange; phenomenologies of timing and tempo; practical geometry, line-drawing and know-how; and folds as idea and practice in letter-writing. Sarah is also an expert in the study of William Blake.
Sarah went to her local comprehensive school before reading English at Cambridge. She was appointed to a Junior Research Fellowship at Oxford, and lectureships at Southampton and Newcastle, before taking up her current post.
She has variously authored, co-authored, edited, and co-edited four books about William Blake, including her first monograph, Blake’s Gifts: Poetry and the Politics of Exchange (CUP, 2010) and William Blake in Context (CUP, 2019). In 2017-18, she held a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, and in 2016-17, she was an Early Career Fellow and the Crausaz-Wordsworth Fellow in Philosophy at CRASSH, the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities. Her current work includes articles about personifications of Kairos-Occasio in Romantic-period graphic art, Dorothy Osborne’s letters, and Blake’s manuscript scraps, and a book about present time, kairos and crisis in Romantic-period anglophone writing and visual culture. This includes chapters on Young’s Night Thoughts and its illustrators; visual personifications of Kairos, from Quarles to Cruikshank; revolutionary writing by Paine, Burke and Helen Maria Williams; love letters and epistolary fiction by Richardson, Chesterfield, Piozzi, Judith Madan, Wollstonecraft, Eliza Fenwick, Maria Edgeworth and Austen; conversion narratives by Equiano and John Newton; deep time and history in Charlotte Smith; and periodical writing by Mary Robinson, Hazlitt and Hunt.
Sarah co-teaches a Faculty MPhil Research Frameworks Seminar, Material Texts, and offers undergraduate lecture courses on ‘things’ and material culture; travel, trade and empire; love letters; and other topics, for the Lyric (II.17), Love, Gender and Sexuality (II.9), Long-Eighteenth Century (IB.6) and Practical Criticism (IA.1) papers. At Queens’, she teaches Practical Criticism and Critical Practice from Plato to the present, and long-eighteenth century writing (IB.6, II.9). She also acts as Director of Studies (academic tutor) for Queens’ English Finalists, and participates in undergraduate admissions. At Cambridge and previously, Sarah has won or been nominated for student-led teaching awards for outstanding lecturing, outstanding feedback, and contributions to pastoral care.
Research Interests
—kairos, present time, time and genre (autobiography; epistolary fiction; narrative; long poem; lyric; historiography; history painting), phenomenologies of time (especially 1740s - 1840s)
—letter-writing
—William Blake, his works, and their reception, 1780s - present
—gift-giving and exchange in theory and practice, and associated discursive contexts such as patronage, charity, inspiration, sacrifice, salvation, grace, conversation, and correspondence
—material cultures (especially the ‘social life’ of ‘things’) in the long eighteenth century
—practical geometry and know-how
Areas of Graduate Supervision
Sarah would be glad to work with research students (MPhil and PhD) on any topic related to her research interests, or broader academic interests, as outlined above.
Selected Publications
‘The folded familiar letter as material and chronotope’, forthcoming in ELH (Spring 2026)
‘Blake, time and the present moment’, in William Blake’s Universe, ed. David Bindman and Esther Chadwick (London: The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, in association with Philip Wilson Publishers, 2024), pp. 18-25
‘Blake’s Newton, line-drawing, and geometry’, Studies in Romanticism 60. 2 (2021), 123-151
William Blake in Context, ed. Sarah Haggarty (2019), including the chapter, ‘Manuscripts and notebooks’, pp. 43-55
William Blake: Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), co-written by Sarah Haggarty and Jon Mee (2013)
Blake’s Gifts: Poetry and the Politics of Exchange (2010; 2014)
Blake and Conflict, ed. Sarah Haggarty and Jon Mee (2009), including the chapter, ‘From Donation to Demand? Almsgiving and the “Annotations to Thornton”’, pp. 105-125
