Scholarly Monographs

Sara's first book Voiceless Vanguard: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde, an interdisciplinary study of Russian literature, art, and theory, was published in 2014 by Northwestern University Press as part of its Studies in Russian Literature and Theory series. It received the International Research Society for Children's Literature (IRSCL) Book Award in 2015. It was also on the long list for the 2016 Historia Nova Prize for Best Book on Russian Intellectual and Cultural History and was nominated for the 2016 American Association for Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) 2016 Best Book in Literary/Cultural Studies. It has been reviewed by Slavic Review, The Russian Review, Modern Language Review, International Research in Children's Literature, and Barnboken - Journal of Children's Literature Research. 

It was recently published in Russian as Безречие авангарда: Эстетика инфантилизма в русском авангарде by Библиороссика/Bibliorossica in 2023 as part of the Contemporary Western Rusistica series. Bezrechie avangarda was translated by Irina Znaesheva.

Sara's second book, An Ecology of the Russian Avant-Garde Picturebook, which mounts a close analysis of image and text in little-known picturebooks by prominent Russian writers, artists, and intellectuals, was published in 2018 by John Benjamins as volume 9 in the award-winning Children's Literature, Culture, and Cognition series. It has been reviewed in The Lion and the Unicorn, Slavic Review, and Libri & libreri, among others.

Sara is currently completing a book project entitled Miniature Revelations: Childhood in Nabokov's Writings (forthcoming with Toronto University Press). It argues that throughout Nabokov's work, the neglected and inscrutable child, who might be mistaken for a marginal figure, in fact offers a miniature revelation and key to Nabokov's novels that enables a reevaluation of his texts. 

Sara's next book project is entitled Alice to Adaland, or Nabokov Through the Looking Glass and traces the multifaceted and lifelong impact on Nabokov's oeuvre -- textual, paratextual, intertextual, extratextual, metatextual, and metaphysical -- of Lewis Carroll's Alice books, the first of which Nabokov translated into Russian in his early literary career as Ania v strane chudes (1922).