Dr Sarah Bernstein

Senior Lecturer

English

Personal statement

I joined Strathclyde in 2021 as Lecturer in English & Creative Writing. Previously, I taught modern and contemporary literature and theory at the Universities of Edinburgh and Sheffield, and in 2018 I held a postdoctoral fellowship at IASH. My research focuses on twentieth-century literature, with an emphasis on literary experimentation, gender, care and the commons. I am particularly interested in the idea of literary 'difficulty': its forms, its uses, its affordances. In addition to my critical work, I am the author of two novels, The Coming Bad Days and Study for Obedience, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, Scotland's National Book Awards, and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Awards and the Highland Book Prize. I have also published a collection of poetry, Now Comes the Lightning. My work has been translated into 16 languages.

Expertise

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Prize And Awards

Internationaler Literaturpreis Shortlisting: Recipient; 26/5/2025
Dublin International Literary Award Longlist: Recipient; 31/1/2025
Scotland's National Book Awards - Shortlisting: Recipient; 2024
Highland Book Prize Longlisting: Recipient; 2024
Booker Prize Shortlisting: Recipient; 21/9/2023
Granta Best of Young British Novelists: Recipient; 14/4/2023

More prizes and awards

Publications

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Publications

The Shanda: Bernstein Sarah; 113 (2025)
Übung in Gehorsam: Bernstein Sarah; (2025)
Study for Obedience (French translation - France): Bernstein Sarah; (2025)
Study for Obedience (Spanish Translation): Bernstein Sarah; (2025)
Manual Per a L’obediència: Bernstein Sarah; (2025)
Maerl: Bernstein Sarah; (2025)

More publications

Teaching

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Teaching

I teach literature and creative writing at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

I am open to PhD proposals in English on the following areas of twentieth-century literature:

the idea of literary difficulty
experimental fiction
literature and the welfare state
literature and work
literature and housing
literature and silence

I am open to PhD proposals in Creative Writing that have a strong commitment to critical work alongside the creative project. I am particularly interested in supervising projects in fiction and non-fiction that experiment with form and that explore themes including: silence, precarity, academia, inheritance, land ownership, and motherhood.

Research

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Research Interests

My critical research focuses on the politics of experiment and the politics of care in twentieth-century literature. My current book project, Difficult Women and the Common Good: Towards a Literature in Commons explores the relationship between affective and aesthetic difficulty in the work of Scottish writers such as Muriel Spark and Helen Adam and American writers like Gertrude Stein and Laura Riding. I look at how the operations of these ‘difficult women’ can, counterintuitively, offer new ways of conceiving forms of social cooperation.

My first monograph, The Social-Scientific Imagination: Mid-Century Women's Writing and the Welfare State (in development) concentrates on postwar women writers' indirect and mediated representations of the welfare state in the form of a 'social-scientific imagination', manifested in both subject matter and literary form. An article on Muriel Spark and the post-war worker, which arose from this project, was published in Modern Fiction Studies, and a version of the chapter on Angela Carter and post-war economic planning appeared in Contemporary Women's Writing. Elsewhere, I've written on topics like literary experiment and forms of care in Christine Brooke-Rose's novels; austerity, housing and the commons in the fiction of Doris Lessing; Agatha Christie and the modern girl; and, with Patricia Malone, on academic precarity and literary experiment in the zine Academics Against Networking.

My creative writing practice also focuses on an investigation into aesthetic and affective difficulty. My first novel, The Coming Bad Days, was published by Daunt Books in 2021 and is interested in ideas of distance, detachment and attention. My second novel, Study for Obedience, borrows from the painter Paula Rego's idea that women can be 'obedient and murderous at the same time'. A collection of prose poetry, Now Comes the Lightning, was published by Pedlar Press in 2015 and shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Writing.