Sarah Weston specializes in literature and art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a particular interest in William Blake, Romanticism, and the history of science and mathematics. She is also a writer and book artist who replicates nineteenth-century printmaking techniques.
Weston’s research and teaching dwells in the energy found at the intersection of the arts and sciences—knitting histories of literature, art, and media with those of mathematics, data, and science. Trained as both a literary scholar and an art historian, she sees the “sister arts" as inextricable.
Weston is currently working on a two-book study of Romantic literature, mathematics, and art, investigating the invention of our modern relationship to numbers and data. The Cypher and The Abyss: Outline Against Infinity and Wild Form: Romantic Aesthetics of Multiplicity each explores different subsets of Romantic numbers and their literary, artistic, and mathematical forms. Her work has been generously supported by the Huntington Library, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale Center for British Art, Lewis Walpole Library, Gale, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Weston's other interests include environmental humanities, book history, disability studies, sound studies, the history of photography, and digital humanities. Her work on braille, the desert, and “particulars and pixels,” can be found in The Wordsworth Circle and European Romantic Review. Weston leads several digital humanities projects, including BlakeTint, which traces Blake’s shifting use of color across the illuminated books.
When she is not researching, teaching, or writing, you can find her in the printshop, learning and replicating eighteenth- and nineteenth-century printmaking techniques. After apprenticing with Michael Phillips to learn Blake’s process, Weston wrote, illustrated, etched, and printed her own set of Songs of Innocence and of Experience using Blake’s artisanal “infernal method.” In her more recent book art, Weston is experimenting with intaglio engraving, marbling paper, monotyping, and paper folding.
Weston is also a poet and fiction-writer, and encourages similar creative practice in the classroom, inviting students to engage with and respond to texts creatively. Weston frequently offers courses that rest at the intersection of the arts and sciences, including “Earth, Sky, Stardust: Literature and the Cosmos” and “Disappearing Act: Ghosts, Spies, Shadows.” She received the Fred Strebeigh & Linda H. Peterson Prize for Excellence in Teaching at Yale.
Weston holds B.A. degrees with honors and distinction in English and Art History from Stanford University (2014) and an M.Phil in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature from the University of Cambridge (2015). She received a Ph.D. in both English and History of Art from Yale University (2023), where she also obtained certificates in Environmental Humanities; Film & Media Studies; and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.