Sarah Wright

Sarah Breckenridge Wright specializes in medieval literature and sustainability studies. Her research typically focuses on movement and networks, geography and landscape studies, and/or material culture in late Middle English literature. Her secondary interests include history and structure of the English language and speculative fiction. 

She has published articles on imaginary castles, ever-full cows, and medieval gravesites. Her monograph Mobility and Identity in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales combines the theoretical and historical methods of literary analysis with the interpretive tools of cultural geography and ecocriticism to argue that movement is the medium through which identity is performed in The Canterbury Tales. This unique interdisciplinary approach shows how physical and ideological mobilities shape and are shaped by geographical, ecological, sociopolitical, and gendered identities. As human and more-than-human bodies cross borders and dissolve boundaries, they contribute to a fluid, permeable, and hybrid world that challenges traditional perceptions of boundedness, security, and fixity. By examining this kinesis alongside contexts including medieval bridge building, economics, and biology, this book reveals a rich exchange between word and world. In the end, The Canterbury Tales emerges as an amalgam of lived experience and the poetic imagination that both chronicles and constructs a world in the process of becoming.

Education