Dr. Sarah Pyke
Sarah Pyke teaches children’s and Young Adult literature at the University of Münster. Formerly Munby Fellow in Bibliography 2023-24 at Cambridge University Library and a Fellow of Darwin College, Sarah has taught at Anglia Ruskin University, London Rare Books School, and the University of Roehampton and has held fellowships at Freie Universität Berlin and the Institute of English Studies, University of London.
In her research, Sarah is most interested in the histories and afterlives of reading and in our ongoing material and affective engagements with textual objects, with particular attention to childhood, adolescence, and queer selfhood. Or to put it another way, in why and how books continue to matter (and to whom). Her current project, a group biography of Harper & Row editor Ursula Nordstrom and her authors/illustrators Margaret Wise Brown, Maurice Sendak, Louise Fitzhugh, John Donovan and Arnold Lobel, examines these canonical and beloved figures as an underacknowledged queer constellation at the heart of mid-century American children’s literature. In 2024, Sarah curated the exhibition Seized Books! LGBTQ+ Books and Censorship in 1980s Britain at Senate House Library, with Leila Kassir. Their co-authored catalogue was published in April 2025. Sarah edited the Queer Bibliography special issue of the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (June 2024) with Malcolm Noble, following their inauguration of the – now annual – Queer Bibliography conference in 2023. Additionally, Sarah contributed three chronologies, a chapter, and editiorial support to thethree-volume Cambridge History of Children’s Literature in English (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press).