Dr. Sarah Ropp is Dialogue Director for the SNF Paideia Program at the University of Pennsylvania. In this role, she teaches several Paideia designated undergraduate courses in the Communications and Comparative Literature programs; facilitates dialogue workshops and events for diverse audiences around campus; creates resources; and provides advising to students, staff, and faculty undertaking dialogue work. Sarah is a multi-lingual and interdisciplinary scholar/practitioner with over 20 years of experience in dialogue-centered education. A native of the rural Midwest, she has lived, studied, and taught in 7 countries on 4 continents and in rural, small-town, and urban areas all over the United States.
Sarah holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas at Austin. Her scholarly work focuses on problematizing discourses of resilience and renewal centered on the child as paradigmatic victim/survivor in the contemporary United States, Latin America, and Western Europe. As a dialogue practitioner and researcher, Sarah is interested in the role of dialogue, particularly testimony as a dialogic practice, in anti-oppression approaches to teaching, learning, and community-based work, taking special inspiration from the critical pedagogy of bell hooks and Paulo Freire.
Find some of Sarah’s recent work here:
“Decolonizing Dialogue” blog series
Stories of Self (an open-access, self-guided curriculum for writing the college admissions essay)
“Troubling Survivorism in The Bluest Eye,” MELUS
“The Child and the Latina Immigrant: Reimagining the Southern California Imaginary in Héctor Tobar’s The Barbarian Nurseries,” Western American Literature
Contact Information
Email: sropp@sas.upenn.edu