Sarah Rivett

Sarah Rivett is Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (2011), Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation (2017), and is currently completing Raven’s Land: Indigenous Literature and the American Canon. Her research explores how religion, archives, and ecologies shape American literature across time and place from sixteenth-century New England to twenty-first-century Alaska. Tracing intersections of European, African American, and Indigenous histories, Rivett’s scholarship and teaching seek to recover voices and stories of the past that have been obscured or forgotten in colonial archives. Drawing on a vast archive of oral and written literature, visual images, objects, and religious and scientific texts, Rivett’s research seeks to illuminate the significance of Indigenous traditions as they intersect with and shape American literary and cultural production. Professor Rivett is the 2026-2027 Frank M. Updike Memorial Scholar.