Rate My Professor Sarah Eldridge

Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge was a distinguished scholar in Literature at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, serving as tenured Associate Professor of German and Chair of the German program within the Department of World Languages and Cultures. She obtained her B.A. in German from the University of Chicago, followed by her M.A. and Ph.D. in German from Princeton University. Eldridge's academic interests centered on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature, with a particular emphasis on the novel. Her research delved into the novel's role as a medium for self-expression and societal experimentation during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, exploring its intersections with biology, pedagogy, and legal discourses. Additional foci included the processes of canonization in literary history, religious writing as a precursor to the novel genre, and philosophical concepts of "care of the self."

Throughout her career, Eldridge made significant contributions through her publications. Her first monograph, Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel, 1795–1830, was published by Camden House in 2016. Her second book, Composite Selves: Subjecthood in the German Novel, 1700–1795, appeared with Oxford University Press in 2025. She published numerous articles in leading journals and volumes, including "Interior Whiteness: Race and the 'Rise of the Novel'" (Goethe Yearbook, 2023), "Crossing the Front Lines: Female Leadership, Politics, and War in Die Familie Seldorf" (Realities and Fantasies of German Female Leadership, 2019), "Fissures of Empfindsamkeit: Tonal Shifts and Literary Depictions of Femininity in Goethe and Wezel" (Women in German Yearbook, 2017), "Published Space: Eighteenth-Century Theories of the Public and Private in Johann Michael von Loen's Der redliche Mann am Hofe (1740)" (The Eighteenth Century, 2018), "Imaginative Didacticism: Emotion, Individuality, and the Function of Trivialliteratur around 1800" (Journal of Literary Theory, 2016), "Narrating (Im)Maturity: The Progressive Popularization of Enlightenment Principles in Wielands Geschichte des Agathon and Engels Herr Lorenz Stark" (Monatshefte, 2015), and "Confessions of a Childless Woman: Fictional Autobiography around 1800" (Goethe Yearbook, 2014). Eldridge received prestigious honors, including a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award for research in Germany from September to December 2016 and the Goethe Society Article Prize in 2020. In her teaching, she covered German literature and culture from the Enlightenment to the early twentieth century, philosophy, history, and language courses. She also held an affiliated faculty position in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Program.