Sarah Allison

Sarah D. Allison is the Hutchinson Distinguished Professor and Director of Composition at Loyola University New Orleans and the author of The Rise of Celebrity Authorship: Nineteenth-Century Print Culture and Antislavery (Columbia University Press, 2025). It draws on interlocking computational approaches - book history, digital archives, and algorithmic criticism - to create a study of “portraits of authors” that centers the many players who worked to produce the figure of the Transatlantic celebrity author. It argues for the value of data-based approaches in thinking across fields of specialization, as does a special issue of Studies in the Novel she co-edited with Megan Ward: “Nobody Cares but Everybody Should: Towards a New History of the Novel” (2024).

She specializes in large-scale textual analysis and the novels and criticism of nineteenth-century Britain. also the author of Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018). As a member of Stanford’s Literary Lab, she was a co-author of its first pamphlet, “Quantitative Formalism,” a study of style and genre, as well as “Style at the Scale of the Sentence,” and “Canon, Archive and Literary History,” all since reprinted in the volume Canon/Archive: Studies in Quantitative Formalism (n+1 books, 2017). Her work has appeared in PMLA, ELH, Genre, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Poetry, Journal of Cultural Analytics, Public Books, and Avidly. You can read more about her research and publications here.

 She is affiliated with the Section on the Sociology of Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Classes Taught

• First-Year Seminar: Why Poetry?
• Critical Reading and Writing: Local News (Service Learning Component)
• Literature of Protest
• Reading Poetry
• Jane Austen and Fan Culture
• Great Figures: Charles Dickens and Shonda Rhimes
• 19th Century British Fiction and Digital Methods

Areas of Expertise

• Novels, poetry, and nonfiction in the nineteenth century
• Algorithmic criticism
• Transatlantic print culture
• Escape reading