Sarah Covington

Sarah Covington - Professor  -  profile photo

Research Interests

  • Early Modern Britain and Ireland

Education

  • PhD in History at the Graduate Center

Contact

Affiliated Campus(es)

  • Queens College

Sarah Covington is professor of history at the Graduate Center and Queens College, and Program Director of the M.A. Program in Biography and Memoir.

 In addition to authoring over thirty articles, she has written two books, The Trail of Martyrdom: Persecution and Resistance in Sixteenth Century England (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003) and Wounds, Flesh and Metaphor in Seventeenth-Century England (Palgrave, 2009). Her interest in recent years has shifted to Ireland and biography, with a forthcoming book to be published by Oxford University Press entitled "Remembering Oliver Cromwell in Ireland," about the legacy and afterlives of this most hated villain in the country's history. She has also contributed to and co-edited a collection of essays entitled Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods and Perspectives (Routledge, 2018) and, returning to her earlier interests, Explorations in Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts (Routledge, 2020). As co-director of the Irish in New York oral history project, sponsored by the Queens College Irish Studies program, which she also directs, she is particularly interested in capturing the lives of overlooked and working class men and women who immigrated to New York from the 1950s on, and has interviewed them extensively as well.

Selected recent essays include:

  • “Introduction: Calvinist Statesman, Jesuit Martyr: The Worlds of Fulke Greville and Robert Southwell,” in Precarious Identities: The Works of Fulke Greville and Robert Southwell, ed. Afroditi Panaghis and Vassiliki Markidou (Routledge, forthcoming).

  • “Dung beetles and the ‘Vulgar Traditions: Applying Folkloric Sources and Methods to Early Modern Ireland,’ in Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods and Perspectives, co-edited with Vincent Carey and Valerie McGowan-Doyle (Routledge, 2018).

  • ‘Towards a New ‘Folkloric Turn” in the Literature of Early Modern Ireland,” Literature Compass 15 (2018).

  • “’Those Savage Days of Memory: John Temple and his Narrative of the 1641 Uprising,” in Fionnuala Dillane, Naomi McAreavey, and Emilie Pine (eds.), The Body in Pain in Irish Literature and Culture (London: Palgrave MacMillan. 2016).

  • “’Realms so barbarous and cruell’: Writing Violence in Early Modern Ireland and England. History 99 (2014: 487-504.

  •  “’The Odious Demon from across the Sea’: Oliver Cromwell, Memory and the Dislocations of Ireland,” in Memory before Modernity: Memory Cultures in Early Modern Europe, eds. Judith Pollmann et al (Leiden: Brill, 2014): 149-164.

  • “Martyrdom and the Court of Law: Interrogations and Legal Rhetoric in the Making of Early Modern English Martyrs,” Mortality 19 (2014): 134-150.

Sarah Covington - Professor  -  profile photo

Contact

Affiliated Campus(es)

  • Queens College

Books