Sarah Lynn Patterson teaches African American literature in the English department at UMass. She specializes in 19th-century African American literature, women writers, Black print culture, gender and morality studies and digital humanities. Sarah's current project explores how the goals of educational and moral attainment undergirded Black intellectual-activists' racial uplift initiatives and notions of leadership. Sarah is a co-founder of the award-winning Colored Conventions Project (ColoredConventions.org). She is co-editing the essay collection, Colored Conventions in the 19th Century and the Digital Age. It will be the first scholarly volume to assess the magnitude of influence Colored Conventions had upon Black intellectual and political histories.

Her teaching interests include (auto)biography, gender studies, popular newspaper cultures and social reform literature. She also advocates for interdisciplinary approaches to literary analysis and experimentation with digital tools that advance data literacy and traditional and creative textual studies.