Sarah Schwartzman Ramsey

Sarah Schwartzman Ramsey is a scholar of contemporary literature, American religion, and gender, and she writes on religious thought and ritual in Jewish American women’s contemporary novels. Her recent published work can be found in Studies in American Jewish Literature, The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and forthcoming in Shofar.

In her developing book project, which builds from her dissertation, “Sacred Fiction: Jewish American Women’s Literature as Lived Religion,” Sarah uncovers how contemporary Jewish women writers cultivate ties between living and ancestral Jews, relationships developed through ritualized and ostensibly secular literary practices. She argues that contemporary fiction offers insight into how lay Jewish women generate and expand religious ideas about the afterlife when they elevate not traditional holy texts like Torah or Talmud, but instead alternative documents written and safeguarded by women, materials like grandmothers’ diaries, found letters, and well-worn novels. She illustrates how present-day protagonists immerse themselves in writers’ legacies through textual study, research, and creative production. In doing so, Sarah identifies how characters and their authors, both, cultivate distinctive and often unrecognized religious literacies that enact and alter the traditional form and focus of Jewish ritual life: modifying what rituals entail, whom they serve, and what beliefs, values, and commitments they nourish. 

At CU, Sarah teaches a breadth of topics related to American literature, Jewish Studies, American religion, and Gender Studies.

Courses Taught at CU

ENG 3310 Bible as Literature

ENG 1270 Introduction to American Literature by Women

ENG 2016 Children’s Literature

ENG 1001 Reading, Writing, Culture

ENG 3016 Writing in the Age of AI

Fellowships at CU

CU Boulder George F. Reynolds Fellow 2025-26

Degrees

PhD in English Literature, CU Boulder, Certificate in Jewish Studies

M.A. in Religious Studies, UC Riverside