Sarah Cole

Sarah Cole is a U.S. writer and academic administrator specializing in British literature from the 19th and 20th centuries. She is the dean of Columbia University School of the Arts and Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature. Cole served as Columbia University’s Dean of Humanities up to September 2023, during which time, she founded the Humanities War and Peace Initiative. She also spearheaded a scholarly and pedagogical initiative, Climate Humanities, in partnership with the Columbia Climate School.

A specialist in literary modernism, she is the co-founder of the area-wide NYNJ Modernism Seminar and serves on the board of several scholarly journals. She teaches courses in literary modernism and other topics in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the protest novel, war and violence, the body and sexuality, Irish literature, and author focused courses on Woolf, Eliot, Wells, Joyce, and others.

Life Cole was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her Ph.D. is from the University of California, Berkeley (1997) and her B.A. from Williams College (1989).

Selected works