Sarah Buchmeier is a literary scholar and public historian whose work centers around questions of narrative realism, secularism, and theories of interpretation, with particular interest in principles of public interpretation. Before joining Rice, she worked with the National Park Service in multiple capacities: first, as a Park Ranger in charge of education and interpretation programs at Pullman National Historical Park in Chicago, and more recently, as a Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Lowell National Historical Park in Lowell, MA. There, she worked with local partners and artists to create an exhibit installation and LP titled, The Measure of Work: Sounds of Labor in Lowell, which reframes the narrative of industrialization around shifting soundscapes across Lowell’s long history.

Buchmeier has published on a wide variety of topics in both academic and public outlets, including Park Stewardship Forum, Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, Religion & Literature, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and JSTOR Daily. Her book project, Anxious Realism in the Age of Secularism traces the transnational history of secularism and counters the longstanding account of American realism as secularism’s collaborator. She argues that authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Wilson, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Herman Melville used narrative form to imagine frameworks for secularity that have been lost to the secularization thesis of the twentieth century.