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 co-director of the study abroad program, UA in Oxford: English, History, and Honors. 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 and co-faculty advisor for the Will Nolan Film Club.
His first book, Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major (Palgrave, 2024) is a collection of essays co-edited with Emma Atwood that focuses on how professors teach Shakespeare to undergraduate students not majoring in English nor 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. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.
“Introduction: Teaching Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century” (co-authored with Emma Atwood). Teaching Shakespeare beyond the Major, eds M. Tyler Sasser and Emma Atwood. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. 1-19.
“Trump and Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature 51 (2023): 150-81.
“The Pattern of Trauma in YA Adaptations of Shakespeare.” Liberating Shakespeare: Adaptation and Empowerment for Young Adult Audiences. Eds. Jennifer Flaherty and Deborah Uman. London: Arden, 2023. 92-106.
“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).
