Dr. Sara Brown

Sara Brown PhD MSc(Econ) serves Signum University as Language & Literature Department Chair and Thesis Coordinator for the MA Program. She is a Lecturer and Preceptor within the Language and Literature faculty and has served as an Elected Faculty Member on the Board. Sara also teaches in the Signum EverLearn Program.

Sara Brown lives in North Wales, UK. She was an English teacher, teaching ungrateful teenagers, for over twenty-five years but gave this up to work full time for Signum University. She has been with Signum since 2012,where she has taught on courses with, amongst others, Corey Olsen, Verlyn Flieger, Dimitra Fimi, Robin Reid, Doug Anderson, Amy Sturgis, and John Garth. In 2017 Sara presented a 12-week lecture series for the Masters Program entitled ‘Tolkien in Context: Middle-earth as a Roadmap to Twentieth-Century Anxieties’, which explored Tolkien’s writing as a response to modernity. In 2023, she co-presented a second 12-week lecture series entitled Race, Gender, and the Other in Tolkien's Middle-earth with Dr Christopher Vaccaro.

Besides her BA (Hons) in English and History, Sara has an MSc in International History, Politics & Economics from the London School of Economics, for which she wrote a thesis on The Problem of the Gold Standard in International Politics and Economics in the Nineteenth Century. She completed her Ph.D. in Literature at Salford University in 2013. Entitled From Abjection to Alchemy in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth Legendarium, her thesis explored the way in which Tolkien was responding to the anxieties of the post-war world in the mid twentieth century, drawing on (amongst others) the theories of Julia Kristeva and Donna Haraway. She believes it’s a real page-turner.

Sara has given a number of lectures at various conferences on the topics of Tolkien, fantasy fiction, and fandom, and is regularly seen at Tolkien Society events in the UK. She currently serves on the editorial board of Mallorn, the academic journal of the Tolkien Society, and is co-presenter on podcasts such as The Tolkien Experience, The Rings of Power Wrap-Up, Rings and Rituals and The Prancing Pony. She has a number of article publications in the Journal of Tolkien Research, including as co-editor of a special issue on “Tolkien and Psychology” (2025), and won the Tolkien Society Award for Best Article in 2023 and 2024. Sara is currently working on two books: Transdisciplinary Critical Approaches to Middle-earth with Kristine Larsen, and Transgressive Tolkien, with Christopher Vaccaro. Her research interests are primarily in Tolkien Studies.