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.
She 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, having most recently contributed an essay to the exhibition catalogue for William Blake’s Universe, held in Spring 2024 at the Fitzwilliam Museum, and Summer 2024 at the Hamburger Kunsthalle.
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.
Sarah 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. She is currently writing a book about present time and kairos in Romantic-period British writing and visual culture.
Sarah teaches a Faculty MPhil Specialist Seminar related to her current research, and lectures for undergraduate examination papers including Love, Gender and Sexuality (II.9), Literature and Its Contexts, 1660-1870 (IB.6), Lyric (II.17) and Practical Criticism and Critical Practice (PCCP, IA.1). At Queens’, she teaches PCCP, long-eighteenth century writing (IB.6, II.9), and Transitions, a course that supports students with the transition from school or college to university and beyond. She is also Director of Studies (academic tutor) for the 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
—William Blake, his works, and their reception, 1780s-present
—representations and philosophies of kairos and present time, from classical Greece to the contemporary, but especially 1740s-1840s
—letter-writing and epistolary fiction, 1640s-1840s
—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 in the long eighteenth century
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
