AboutOur PeopleSarah Ropp
Sarah Ropp standing against stone building
Faculty Staff

Sarah Ropp

SNF Paideia Dialogue Director / Andrea Mitchell Center Postdoctoral Fellow

Sarah Ropp is the 2021-2022 Andrea Mitchell Center / SNF Paideia Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. As a Childhood Studies and Comparative Literature scholar, she explores the many ways in which children in a range of 20th and 21st century contexts bear the burden of resolving adult anxieties over vulnerability and survival by being forced to perform unconditional resilience in the aftermath of trauma.

A former U.S. public school teacher, Sarah is invested in dialogic and liberatory pedagogies that reimagine the classroom as a joyful space of community in the most inclusive and participatory sense. Her Spring 2022 SNF Paideia designated course is entitled “Good Talk: The Purpose, Practice, and Representation of Dialogue across Difference.”

Sarah has published scholarly articles in a variety of literary and cultural studies journals. Her public-facing writing on dialogic pedagogy can be found at Thinking In Community, the official blog of the UT-Austin Humanities Institute, and she also provides open-access original resources related to classroom dialogue at her website, sarahropp.com/resources-for-dialogue/. Most recently, she has created an open-access college admissions essay writing guide at storiesofselfworkshop.com.

Contact Information

Email: sropp@sas.upenn.edu