Research

Sarah's teaching and research interests include American religious history, New Religious Movements, women and religion, children and religion, contemporary Paganism, and nature religion. Sarah is particularly interested in the growing scholarly conversation between Religious Studies and Childhood Studies. She maintains an interdisciplinary bibliography for this work.

Her dissertation research on American Waldorf Education (an alternative pedagogical system rooted in Austrian esotericist Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophical movement) is an interdisciplinary project, combining historical and ethnographic methods. In support of this research she was awarded a Humanities/Social Sciences Research Grant from the Graduate Division at UCSB. Her dissertation analyzes themes of childhood and innocence, ideal motherhood, nature and naturalness, and the relationship between power and secrecy in esotericism.

Sarah began a new research project under the working title Plural Voices: Fundamentalist Mormon Women and American Public Discourse, as a visiting scholar last year in the Women's Studies Program at Northeastern University.