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Sarah Bartlett Churchwell is a professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK. Her research is into 20th- and 21st-century American literature and cultural history, especially the 1920s and 1930s. She has appeared on British television and radio and has been a judge for the Booker Prize, the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. She is the director of the Being Human festival and the author of three books: The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe ; Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby; and Behold America: A History of America First and the American Dream . In April 2021, she was long-listed for the Orwell Prize for Journalism.
Churchwell grew up in Winnetka, near Chicago, Illinois. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from Vassar College and an MA and PhD in English and American Literature from Princeton University. [1]
Churchwell lectured at the University of East Anglia from 1999 until 2015, when she became professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities and director of the Being Human festival at the School of Advanced Study at London University. [2]
She has written for outlets such as The New York Review of Books , The New York Times Book Review , The Times Literary Supplement , The Spectator , and the New Statesman . [3]
Her books include The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (2004); and Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby (2013) about F. Scott Fitzgerald. [4] [5]
Radio appearances include the BBC Radio 4 In Our Time [6] . She has written and presented Radio 4 documentaries on Henry James, the American Dream and America First, [7] The Great Gatsby, When Harry Met Sally, and Radio 3 essays on Screen Goddesses (2017) and Screen Gods (2019).
Churchwell was a judge for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. [8]