Department of English Welcomes Professor Sarah Idzik
By Maria Ferrato
Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of English is excited to welcome alumna Sarah Idzik to the faculty as a tenure-track assistant professor.
The department is thrilled to welcome Idzik back to the community after having received her MA here.
“We’re delighted to welcome Sarah back to CMU,” Department Head Andreea Ritivoi shared. “Our faculty looks forward to working with her and we’re excited for our students to get to work with her, too.”
Idzik shares in this excitement. Hailing from Pittsburgh, she’s eager to come back home to the city and also to rejoin the CMU community.
“It feels like a homecoming, and I am delighted to have such welcoming and brilliant scholars as my colleagues. I feel very lucky to be able to teach and work with CMU students, who are bright, engaged, thoughtful, and energetic,” stated Idzik.
This fall, Idzik will be teaching an undergraduate class (Race, Ethnicity, and Controversy) and an upper-level undergraduate/graduate level course (Rhetoric and the Construction of Race).
Idzik’s Work and Background
Idzik received her BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago in 2008 and her MA in Literary and Cultural Studies from CMU in 2017. She is currently finishing her PhD in Rhetoric and Public Culture at Northwestern University.
Her research focuses on racializing rhetorics as they are situated at specific confluences of power, especially with regards to the racialization of Asian diasporic and Asian American populations. Her dissertation, "Odd Hospitality: Race, Kinship, and Rhetorics of Transnational Adoption," explores historical and contemporary discourses of transnational adoption from Asia, tracing themes of rescue and charity and their racializing effects from the 1950s to the present.
Idzik has a wealth of accomplishments already under her belt. Her work has been published in Adoption & Culture and Southern Communication Journal. Additionally, she received the Rhetoric Society of America Gerald A. Hauser Award for Outstanding Student Paper in 2022 and previously won the Katzman-Yetman Graduate Student Paper Prize by the Mid-America American Studies Association. She has presented at the National Communication Association, Rhetoric Society of America, the Association for Asian American Studies, and Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture conferences, among others.