Sarah Hagaman, Ph.D.

Sarah Hagaman is an Assistant Professor of Health Humanities and Bioethics in the School of Medicine and Dentistry. Her research traces the rise of parodic, irreverent, and ironic disclosures of mental illness, which model what she calls the “postconfessional mode.” More broadly, Sarah’s work argues...

Sarah Hagaman is an Assistant Professor of Health Humanities and Bioethics in the School of Medicine and Dentistry. Her research traces the rise of parodic, irreverent, and ironic disclosures of mental illness, which model what she calls the “postconfessional mode.” More broadly, Sarah’s work argues for and models the application of literature to questions about medicine and public policy. In her current book project, Sarah combines literary analysis, feminist theory, and psychiatric history to articulate a postwar lineage of feminine first-person writing as an extra-institutional therapeutic form. A portion of this project has been published in Medical Humanities—BMJ and Literature and Medicine.

Sarah is also interested in broader questions surrounding disability and gendered bodies. In her second project, tentatively titled Beefcake: Gendering the Athlete, she considers how portrayals of sports uncover the athleticism of the disabled and gendered body in a genre dominated by normative masculinity. Grounded in a transdisciplinary conversation between sports studies, disability theory, and twenty-first century American literature, Sarah traces the rise of women’s sports beginning with Kathy Acker’s Bodies of Work (1997) and Daniel Boyne’s The Red Rose Crew (2000) and pairs them with recent works such as Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot (2024) and the A24 film Love Lies Bleeding (2024).