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Photograph of Sarah Trembath

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Sarah Trembath Senior Professorial Lecturer CAS | Literature

Degrees
EDD, American University; MA, Howard University; BA, Temple University

Favorite Spot on Campus
Battelle Atrium
Book Currently Reading
The Science of Racism by Keon West
Bio
Sarah Trembath is the 2025-2026 interim executive director for the AntiRacist Research and Policy Center. She is also an editor, writer, public scholar, and educator who has been teaching since 1998 and joined the AU faculty in 2014.

Dr. Trembath received her doctorate from A.U. in Education Policy and Leadership and is especially interested in reading and writing pedagogies that enable students to deepen in criticality and expand their worldviews and information bases beyond those that they may have received K-12. She is especially interested in manner in which the "post-truth" milieu and the recent anti-CRT and book banning movements curtail criticality and well-rounded understandings of the world in which we live. She is a decolonial scholar who believes deeply in the pluriverse: "a world in which many worlds exist." She is also a golden era Hip Hop head who is thrilled to be in collaboration with librarian Derrick Jefferson on the 2025-2026 Humanities Truck project "Chocolate City Speaks: Hip Hop Emcees and Spoken Word Artists of 1990s DC."

Dr. Trembath has a regular column--"The Critical Reader"--in the Washington Independent Review of Books. She has also written two books herself: It Was the Scarlet that Did It (poems, Moonstone Press, 2019) and This Past Was Waiting for Me (poetry and creative nonfiction, Lazuli Literary Group, 2025).

She was the 2019 recipient of the American Studies Association’s Gloria Anzaldúa Award for independent scholars for her social justice teaching and writing. Her written work has appeared in Radical Teacher, the Santa Fe Writer’s Project Quarterly, the Rumpus, Everyday Feminism, Sally Hemings Dream zine, Azure literary journal, DCist, the Washington Independent Review of Books, 1455 Magazine, VoiceMale, and the Grace in Darkness anthology of DC women writers.

Dr. Trembath was founding co-chair of the university's Critical Information Literacy Committee, a joint venture comprised of Writing Studies Program faculty and university research librarians. As past cochair of the (former) Information Literacy Committee, she was project lead on the university's AntiRacist Subject Guide--a widely used collective effort that is constantly evolving.

As an educator, Professor Trembath sees her purpose as helping students express critical thinking through writing. As a public scholar, she translates her research into accessible, jargon-free publications for members of the general public interested in criticality, Black literature, the Sankofa ethic, rhetoric, propaganda, and racial bias in text.
For the Media
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Teaching

Spring 2025

  • CORE-105 Complex Problems Seminar: Indoctrination Inoculation

  • LIT-225 African Literature

  • WRT-100 College Writing

Summer 2025

  • LIT-225 African Literature