Sarah Mesle

Sarah Mesle (PhD, Northwestern) has taught in the Writing Program at USC since 2014. Prior to USC, she held post-doctoral fellowships in English at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Mesle’s writing and research focuses on the long history of American popular culture, particularly the intersections of race, femininity, fantasy, and gender, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Game of Thrones to Football Night in America. She hates the word “influencer” but loves when her students teach her about the latest important influencers. She encourages all students interested in learning how to write carefully and meaningfully about media and culture to enroll in her classes. 

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, forthcoming August 25, 2026). She’s an editor at Large at the Los Angeles Review of Books where she was Senior Humanities Editor from 2013-2016. She is editor and co-founder of the LARB Channel Avidly and the short book series Avidly Reads. 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.