Sarah Pittock

About

Sarah Peterson Pittock is an Advanced Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric. She earned a BA in English and French Literatures, with Honors in Humanities, from Stanford University and a PhD in Literature from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her PhD dissertation investigated the ways eighteenth-century British women became literary critics and scholars without access to higher education. Through salon conversation and letter writing, the Bluestockings, as learned women were then known, built reputations as public intellectuals. Their strategies — conversation, collaboration, and community — are at the heart of Dr. Pittock’s research and work as a teacher and writing program administrator. From 2013-2018, she served as Associate Director of the Hume Center, supporting a writing-enriched curriculum through tutor education, writing workshops, graduate writing and speaking programming, and writing pedagogy consultations. Currently, she directs Bing Honors College and coordinates Writing in the Major.

Her PWR1 courses include Growing Up Global: The Rhetoric of Children's Culture Today and Education as Self-Fashioning: College and the Good Life. She also teaches two PWR2 courses, Other Selves: The Art & Science of Friendship and Hope, Health, and Healing: The Rhetoric of Medicine.

Her work has been published in Women's Writing, the WAC Journal, and edited collections. New work is forthcoming in Writing Center Journal. Current projects include a study of the representation of Enlightenment women as “modern Aspasias,” in reference to Socrates's legendary rhetoric consultant.

Areas of specialization: humanities and education

Genre expertise: research statements, personal statements, abstracts, honors theses and dissertations

Enjoys coaching invention, argument, style