Dr. Sarah Henstra

Biography:

Sarah Henstra is a writer and scholar specializing in 20th century British fiction. She is the author of three novels, including The Red Word, which won the 2018 Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction, Mad Miss Mimic (2015), and We Contain Multitudes (2019). Henstra’s monograph, The Counter-Memorial Impulse in Twentieth-Century English Fiction (Palgrave, 2009), examines the narrative effects of unmournable loss in the fiction of such writers as Ford Madox Ford, Doris Lessing, and Jeanette Winterson. Recent scholarly publications include a study of the construction of women’s mourning in British propaganda during WWI, and a pedagogical consideration of Joe Sacco’s “comics journalism.” She teaches courses in the novel, the Gothic, fairy tales, critical theory, and creative writing.

Research Interests:

Public memory and mourning; memorials; (prose) elegy; discourses of social activism; narrative studies; feminism; feminist histories; myths and folklore, archival practices; the occult; secret societies.