Associate Professor Sarah Heaton
Head of Art, Design and Innovation
Sarah joined the University of Chester in 2006, having previously taught at the University of Central Lancashire and the University of Manchester. She has a BA in Russian and American Studies, an MA in American Literature and Culture, and a PGCE. Her PhD was a study of architecture and everyday space in the work of Don DeLillo. She currently works on fashion and fabric in literature.
Sarah has taught across all periods of English Literature from the Renaissance to the present day. She specialises in American Literature; Critical Theory; Film; Fashion in late 19th and early 20thCentury and Contemporary Literature. Modules she teaches or lectures on include:
- Studying Literature
- Criticism and Theory
- American Literature
- Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Postgraduate supervision:
She welcomes enquiries about research projects on:
- Literature, fashion and fabric
- Literature and architecture
- Literature and film
- Nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literature, consumerism and fashion
- Twentieth-century American literature
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Ernest Hemingway
- Edith Wharton
- Henry James
Sarah is currently working on fashion and consumerism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, and is editing a collection on wedding dresses. She has presented papers and written essays, articles and reviews on Don DeLillo, 9/11, architecture, the department store in literature, Mexican film, and the art of parcour. Sarah has had poems published in various national and international poetry publications.
- ‘Gender and Sexuality: Tresses Adorned and Adored, Locks Coiled and Cut’ in A Cultural History of Hair in the Age of Empire (1800-1920) edited by Sarah Heaton (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2018)
- ‘Wayward Wedding Dresses: Fabricating Horror in Dressing Rituals of Femininity’ in Dressed to Kill: Fashionable Horror in Film and Literature ed. By Julia Petrov and Gudrun Whitehead (London: Bloomsbury, 2017)
- ‘Styling the Post-Apocalyptic Self: Blankets and Rags, Skin and Bones, and the Fabric of Power’ in Apocalyptic Chic: Visions of the Apocalypse and Post-Apocalypse in Literature and Visual Arts ed. B. Brodman and J.E. Doan (Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield,2017)
- ‘Literary Fashion Icons: Wearing Holly Golightly and Daisy Buchanan’ in Fashion, Tyranny and Revelation ed. By Damayanthie Eluwawalage (Oxford: IDP, 2016)
- ‘Re-dressing Revenants: Anxieties of the Body, the Self and Desire when the Undead make a Stylish Return’ in The Supernaturals Revamped ed. B. Brodman and J.E. Doan (Maryland: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016)
- ‘Stepping out in bathers: Displaying masculinities in F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Willa Cather’ in Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion Vol 2 No. 1 (February, 2015)
- ‘Coming out from under the Crinolines: the Aura and the Art of Shoes’, Catwalk: A Journal of Fashion and Beauty, (Oxford: IDP, 2013)
- Fashioning Identities: Cultures of Exchange, ed. Sarah Heaton (Oxford: IDP, 2013)
- ‘Vampire Vogue and Female Fashion’ in Images of the Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic, ed. Jim Doan and Barbara Broadman (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013)
- ‘Accessorizing Men: From Neckties to Bathers’ in Trending Now: New Developments in Fashion Studies ed. Laura Petican, Mariam Essehaier, Angela Nurse, Damayanthie Eluwawalage (Oxford: IDP, 2013)
- ‘Consuming Clothes and Dressing Desire in the Twilight Series’ in The Modern Vampire and Human Identity ed. By Dr Deborah Mutch (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012)
BA (Hons) (Keele), MA (Keele), PhD (Keele), PGCE Further and Higher Education (Keele), SFHEA.