Sara Danger

BIOGRAPHY

Sara R. Danger came to Valparaiso University in 2004 as Lilly Postdoctoral Fellow in English and Humanities; she joined the English Faculty in 2006.

Professor Danger teaches courses on Victorian literature and culture, children’s literature, transatlantic literature of the nineteenth century, and women’s writing. In addition to teaching in the English Department, she teaches in the First-Year Experience (CORE) program and has taught Word and Image and first-year seminars in Christ College, the Honors College of Valparaiso University.

In her research, Professor Danger works to recover acts of authorship by marginalized or underrepresented groups, including women, people of color, working classes, and children. She also focuses on how material and visual forms of texts reflect and shape cultural interpretations. 

Her current book project “In Their Own Words: Child Writers and the Nineteenth-Century Press” examines publications by child authors produced in the shadow of the American Civil War. As she argues, more than readers and consumers of the stories for and about them, nineteenth-century children took hold of the tools of literary production, offering fresh and arresting perspectives on major social issues, including race and violence, literary labor and work, gender and class, and child mortality and grief.

SELECT PUBLISHED WORKS

BOOKS

“In Their Own Words: Child Writers and the Nineteenth-Century Press,” in process (under advance contract with University of Massachusetts Press)  

Editor, Domestic Manners of the Americans by Frances Trollope, Illustrated with critical introduction, appendices, and notes (Broadview Press, 2015)

ARTICLES/ESSAYS

“Child Journalists, the Civil War, and the Intersectional Work of Reporting Grief,” invited essay for Editor’s Column, Journal of Juvenilia Studies. Forthcoming.              

“Making News: A Child, Her Printing Press, and the Civil War,” Journal of Juvenilia Studies (Sept. 2021): 13-41. 

“Weaving A World: Children, Memory, and the Story Experience.” Songs From the Silent Passage: Essays on the Works of Walter Wangerin, Jr. Eds. Matthew Dickerson and Anne Doe Overstreet. Rabbit Room, 2020: 129-151. 

“Critical Vision: Word and Image in the Postmodern Age,” Word and World (Fall 2012): 227-237.    

“The Bonnet’s Brim: The Politics of Vision in Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans,” Philological Quarterly (Fall 2009): 239-258.

 “Producing the Romance of Mass Childhood: Kate Greenaway’s Under the Window,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts (Dec. 2009): 311-333.

SELECT AWARDS AND SCHOLARSHIPS

• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society, 2022-2023
• Philip and Miriam Kapfer Endowed Faculty Research Award, Valparaiso University, 2022-2023
• Faculty Development Award, Valparaiso University Alumni Association, 2008 and 2012
• Everett Helm Fellowship, Lilly Library, Indiana University-Bloomington, 2012
• University Research Professorship, Valparaiso University, 2010-2011                                        
• Fleur Cowles Research Fellowship, Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, 2007-2008
• Creative Work and Research Summer Grants, Valparaiso University, 2007 and 2009       
• Outstanding Professor Award, Delta Delta Delta Chapter, Valparaiso University, 2006 and 2007
• Lilly Postdoctoral Fellowship in Humanities and the Arts, Valparaiso University, 2004-2006
• Outstanding Dissertation Award, University of Kansas, May 21, 2005

EDUCATION

Ph.D. – University of Kansas (with honors)

M.A.– South Dakota State University 

B.A.–Concordia College (Moorhead, MN, English and Spanish, summa cum laude)