Dr. Sarah Gilbreath Ford

Interests

Southern Literature
African American Literature
Literature and Law
American Gothic Literature
Eudora Welty
Ecocriticism

Education

Ph.D. Tulane University
M.A. Tulane University
B.A. Baylor University

Bio

Sarah Gilbreath Ford’s research and teaching focus on the literature of the American South, the gothic genre, literature and the environment, and the work of Eudora Welty. She serves as the co-editor of the Eudora Welty Review. She is the author of Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic (2020), which examines how writers use gothic tools to combat slavery’s definition of people as property. Her book Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White (2014) examines how white and African American writers experiment with narrative form to replicate the dynamics of oral storytelling. She has also written articles on southern and early American writers for journals such as Studies in the Novel, Mississippi Quarterly, Early American Literature, and Southern Quarterly. She serves as the web editor of the Eudora Welty Society’s website. In 2018 she won the Welty society’s Phoenix Award for scholarship and service. In 2019 she was named a Baylor Centennial Professor. In 2024-2025 she served as Chair of Baylor’s Faculty Senate.