Sarah Mesle

Sarah Mesle (PhD, Northwestern) is a Professor (Teaching) of Writing at the University of Southern California; she is visiting at Yale in Fall 2026. Mesle’s writing and research focus on the long history of American popular culture, particularly the intersections of race, femininity, fantasy, and gender.  These issues inform her approach to another major interest: the styles, strategies, emotional intensities, and world-building possibilities of expert humanities writing today.

Mesle is the author of Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now (University of Chicago Press, Oct 2025) and Tangled: Seven Iconic Moments in White Women’s Hair and What They Tell Us About Pleasure, Power, and Complicity (Beacon Press, 2026). Previously the Senior Humanities Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Mesle is also the founding co-editor of the  digital magazine Avidly and the short book series Avidly Reads. In addition to her many essays at LARB, her writing has appeared in venues such as The Chronicle of Higher Education, InStyle, Studies in American Fiction, Guernica, and the New York Times Magazine. She is regularly invited to speak in graduate and faculty seminars about the future of academic writing and the possibilities of public intellectual life. Mesle is represented by Tanya McKinnon at McKinnon Literary. 

For a fuller list of invited talks, conference presentations, and courses taught, please download her CV. Her personal website is www.sarahmesle.com.