PhD
Dr. Sarah Orem is a faculty member in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California. She earned her BA in English at Rice University, her MA in Performance Studies from New York University, and her PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research explores performances of disability, race, and gender in 20th and 21st century American literature, rhetoric, and cultural production.
Dr. Orem's writing appears in Modern Drama, The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, African American Review, and Women & Performance, among other venues. From 2016-2019 she was a postdoctoral fellow in American Studies at Smith College, where she designed and taught new disability studies courses. After completing a Mellon/Sawyer postdoctoral fellowship in the Humanities Center at the University of California, Irvine, Orem joined the Writing Program at USC, where she currently teaches courses on composition and the health humanities.
The first paying job Dr. Orem ever held was as an actress in a dinner theater in rural Tennessee. She lives with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and does the crossword puzzle every day.