Dr. Sarah Senk

Associate Professor

Culture & Communication

Cal Poly, Solano Campus

Office: Faculty Office Building, Second Floor, Room 214
Email: ssenk@csum.edu
Phone: (707) 654-1202

 

 

 

 

Education

Degree	Major Emphasis	Institution	Year
Ph.D.	Comparative Literature	Cornell University	2011
M.St.	English	University of Oxford	2004
B.A.	Literature	Yale University	2003

About

Sarah Senk joined the Department of Culture and Communication at California State University Maritime Academy (now Cal Poly, Solano Campus) in 2016. She completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at Cornell University in 2011, where she specialized in 20th- and 21st-century global Anglophone literature and trauma/memory studies.  

Before joining the Cal Maritime faculty in 2016, Dr. Senk was Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Literature in the Department of English and Modern Languages at the University of Hartford, where she taught courses on modern and contemporary Anglophone fiction and poetry and literary theory (including “Survey of Postcolonial Writers,” “Contemporary Fiction,” “Literature and Mourning,” “World Literature in English,” “Black Atlantic Literature and the Archive”), as well as Honoros, FYS and GE courses on “Postmodern Culture,” “Digital Humanities,” “Modernism and the Arts,” “Millennial Memory,” and “Remembering 9/11.” At Cal Poly, Solano Campus she has taught introductory Gen Ed classes in English Composition, Speech Communication, and Critical Thinking, as well as upper-division Humanities courses like “World Literature of the Sea,” “Globalization of Culture,” “Literature and Psychology,” “Ethical Inquiry,” and has offered special topics courses on “9/11 in Cultural Memory” and “Going Viral: From 9/11 to COVID-19.” Her classroom work earned her Hartford’s Innovations in Teaching and Learning Award and the Davis All-University Curriculum Award for interdisciplinary curricular development, as well as Cal Maritime’s Outstanding Teacher Award.  

Beyond her classroom work, Dr. Senk has served in pivotal leadership and governance roles on the Solano campus. After chairing the Cal Maritime Faculty Senate Bylaws Revision Task Force in 2019, she held successive posts on the Senate Executive Committee, including Secretary, Vice Chair (2022-2024), and Chair (2024-2025). She was appointed in 2023 to a three-year term as Director of General Education and is Co-PI (with Amy Parsons) on a Teagle Foundation grant to support the development of the Solano campus’s signature Maritime General Education Program and its integration with the Edwards Leadership Development Program (ELDP). In prior years, she has served as Community-Engaged Learning Faculty Liaison, co-chaired the Community Day planning committee and Maritime Film Festival, and worked as a member of the Institution-Wide Assessment Council, Orientation Committee, School of Letters and Sciences Strategic Planning Committee, the Outstanding Faculty awards committees, Pride in Maritime Summit planning committee, GWAR working group, Cadet Success Team, ELDP Workgroup, Provost Search Committee, First-Year Experience working group, and the C&C and GSMA departmental RTP committees. In AY 2024-2025 she served with Cal Poly Senate Chair Jerusha Greenwood on the CSU Office of Academic & Student Affairs Shared Governance Workgroup and worked with Cal Poly faculty leadership to integrate the Cal Maritime and Cal Poly senates. In addition to her work at the university, she is a member of the Board of Directors of the national nonprofit, Marked By Covid, where she serves as Strategic Advisor to the organization’s co-founders. 

Dr. Senk’s research interests include contemporary literature, trauma and cultural memory, speculative fiction and film, “slow disaster,” and commemoration in the digital age. Her work explores how stories (and various forms of cultural production) shape and are shaped by the ways societies experience and remember catastrophes, whether sudden events like the September 11 attacks, slow-burn crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, or historical events with ongoing repercussions. Her work has appeared in The Canadian Review of American Studies, Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics, Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, Contemporaries, The American Prospect, Slate, and The Washington Post.  

Along with Taiyo Inoue (Math) she is co-host of My Robot Teacher, a podcast on AI and higher education sponsored by the California Education Learning Lab (available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify).  

Publications

“Framing Traumatic Memory from 9/11 to COVID-19: Comparative Perspectives on Commemorative Discourse,” in Experiencing War Memorials, ed. Jennifer K. Ladino (University of Alabama Press) [forthcoming] 

“Marked By Covid’s Memory Activism,” [with Kristin Urquiza and Christine Keeves], in Covid Studies: A Reader, ed. Scott Gabriel Knowles, Alexa Dietrich, and Rodrigo Ugarte (University of Pennsylvania Press) [forthcoming]

“The Trouble with Viewing 9/11 and the Pandemic Through a Wartime Lens,” The Washington Post (September 9, 2022) [co-authored with Lila Nordstrom]

“The Memory Exchange: Public Mourning at the National 9/11 Memorial Museum,” Canadian Review of American Studies Vol. 48, No. 2 (2018), pp. 254-276

“Mourning's Spiral: Trauma, Time, and Memory in Derek Walcott's Omeros,” Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics Vol. 16 (October 2016), pp. 35-51

“Rethinking Rupture” [review of Insurgent Testimonies: Witnessing Colonial Trauma in Modern and Anglophone Literature by Nicole Rizzuto], Contemporary Literature Vol. 57, No. 3 (Fall 2016), pp. 453-461

“Attention to the Text: Delay and the ‘ADD Generation,’” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, Vol. 25, No. 2, Teaching Disability (Winter 2016), pp. 78-95

“The Glass Bowl of Memory: Plotting 1993 and the National 9/11 Memorial Museum,” Post 45: Contemporaries (June 2015)

“On this Day, Nothing Happened,” Slate Magazine (June 15, 2015)

“Roundtable - Cindy Hamamovitch, No Man's Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor [review with Abigail Ward and Henrice Altink]”, Journal of American Studies Vol. 48, No. 1 (February 2014), pp. 309-319

“Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov by Martin Hägglund [review]”, MLN: Modern Language Notes Vol. 128, No. 5 (December 2013), pp. 1207-1211

 “Lost in Space: Is it really possible to memorialize 9/11 in the heart of New York's financial district?” The American Prospect (September 12, 2011)

Podcasts and other media

Podcast: My Robot Teacher [co-host with Taiyo Inoue] 

• Episode 1 - “Resistance is Brief… and Futile” [YouTube Link] 
• Episode 2 [YouTube Link] 

Interview: “Don’t Forget to Remember,” 99% Invisible Episode 568 (January 30, 2024) [Apple Podcast Link]

Panel Discussion ​​“Deus Ex Machina: Can AI Save the Humanities?” INSPIRE 2024 [California Education Learning Lab 2024 Convening on Reimagining the Future of Teaching and Learning] at UCLA (October 18, 2024) [YouTube Link] 

Interview: “The 9/11 Museum and the Era of Virtual Witness” The Wilson Centre Podcast, University of Aberdeen (November 5, 2014)

Selected Presentations

“Mourning the Unseen, Navigating Slow Disaster,” American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting (May 30-31, 2025)

“Pioneering AI Pedagogy with the California Education Learning Lab” [with Chesa Capares]

Los Rios CCD AI Summit (October 16-18, 2024) 

“Making and Mourning Through the Pandemic,” Creativity in the Time of COVID-19 Conference, Michigan State University (October 10-11, 2024)       

“Making a Living Archive: A Global View on the Sewol Ferry Disaster,” 4.16 Institute of Democratic Citizenship Education, Ansan, South Korea (April 12, 2024)

“ChatGPT: A Brave New World…” [with Taiyo Inoue, Ariel Setniker, and Kitty Luce], Leadership Walnut Creek Contra Costa Chamber of Commerce (February 1, 2024), Pleasant Hill, CA

“Marked By Covid’s Digital Memory Activism,” 2024 Modern Language Association Convention, Philadelphia (January 4-7, 2024)

“Archiving as Bearing Witness” [the Sewol Ferry and COVID-19], 2023 Disaster Haggyo at KAIST (June 30, 2023)

“Death, Grief, and Recovery in Covid Times,” Stanford University Medical Humanities Conference on “Grief, Recovery, and Social Justice in the Wake of Covid-19” (May 19-20, 2023)

“The Marked By Covid Memorial Matrix,” 2023 American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting (March 16-18, 2023), Chicago, IL     

“Chaos and Hope Panel Discussion” at “Resiliency & Hope: A Covid Memorial Day Event with Arizona Governor Hobbs, Marked By Covid, and the Arizona Historical Society,” Arizona Heritage Center (March 6, 2023)          

“Two Pandemics: Narratives of COVID-19 Trauma” 2023 Modern Language Association Convention, San Francisco (January 7-8, 2023)

“COVID-19 Memorials: Aesthetics and Politics,” 2023 Modern Language Association Convention, San Francisco (January 7-8, 2023)

“Covid: What Now?” The Rifkind Center, City College of New York (November 10, 2022)