PhD, English, The University of Southern Mississippi, 2015
MA, English, Georgia Southern University, 2008
BA, English and Psychology, Mercer University, 2006
Renaissance Literature; Shakespeare; Great Books; Children’s Literature; Childhood Studies; Gender and Race Studies; Adaptation Theory; Film
Dr. Sasser is Assistant Professor of Honors at the University of Alabama and Director of the study abroad program, UA in Italy: Following Shakespeare. Between 2015 and 2021, he taught in the English Department, and he has been in the Honors College since 2022. He is the faculty advisor for Alabama’s Boxing Club.
His first book, Teaching Shakespeare beyond the Major (under contract with Palgrave and forthcoming in 2023) is a collection of essays co-edited with Emma Atwood that focuses on how professors teach Shakespeare to undergraduate students who are not majoring in English or Theatre. He is currently completing his first monograph, Shakespearean Boyhood: The Subversive Masculinity of Shakespeare’s Boy Characters, which questions prevailing critical notions that the boy characters in Shakespeare’s dramas are trivial.
Dr. Sasser’s research appears in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Shakespeare Bulletin, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Theatre Journal, The Shakespeare Newsletter, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Children’s Literature in Education, and Children’s Literature. He has contributed essays to Liberating Shakespeare: Adaptation, Trauma and Empowerment for Young Adult Audiences (Arden 2023), Shakespeare and Geek Culture (Arden 2020), Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture (Palgrave 2018), and Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction (Cambridge 2017).
Prone to sudden bouts of wanderlust, Dr. Sasser is an avid reader, traveler, backpacker, caver, cinephile, and amateur musician. He only rarely speaks of himself in third person.
Teaching Shakespeare beyond the Major, ed with Emma Atwood. Under contract with Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. (85,000 words)
“Donald Trump and Children’s Literature.” Forthcoming in Children’s Literature 51 (2023)
“Traumatic Boyhoods in Adaptations of Shakespeare.” Liberating Shakespeare: Adaptation, Trauma and Empowerment for Young Adult Audiences. Eds. Jennifer Flaherty and Deborah Uman. Forthcoming with Arden Shakespeare in 2022. (invited)
“Beyond The Snowy Day: The Politics of Ezra Jack Keats’s Seven Peter Books.” Children’s Literature Association 47.1 (2022): 64-82.
“The Bard of Boys’ Life: Shakespeare and the Construction of American Boyhood.” Shakespeare and Geek Culture. Eds. Peter Holland and A.J. Hartley. London: Arden, 2020. 205-25.
“Moth and the Pedagogical Ideal in Love’s Labour’s Lost.” Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture. Eds. Jennifer Higginbotham and Mark Johnston. New York: Palgrave, 2018. 153-69.
“Hamlet and Contemporary Boys Fiction.” Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction. Ed. A. J. Hartley. New York: Cambridge UP, 2017. 81-100.
“‘the boy that I gave Falstaff’: The Page Boy and Early Modern Manhood in 2 Henry IV and Henry V.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 30 (2017): 147-64.
“The Binding of Isaac: Jewish and Christian Appropriations of the Akedah (Genesis 22) in Contemporary Picture Books.” Children’s Literature 45 (2017): 138-63.
“Unraveling the ‘Desdemona Thing’ in Tennessee Williams.” The Tennessee Williams Annual Review 15 (2016): 147-63.
“‘No one queens it like himself’: Performing Unconventional Boyhood in Historical Shakespearean Fiction.” Children’s Literature in Education 47.1 (2016): 50-65.
“The Snowy Day in the Civil Rights Era: Peter’s Political Innocence and Unpublished Letters from Langston Hughes, Ellen Tarry, Grace Nail Johnson, and Charlemae Hill Rollins.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 39.3 (2014): 359-84.
“Interview with Drew Reeves as King Edward III.” The Shakespeare Newsletter 62.1 (2012): 19-22 (double column).
