Recent Conference Organization

Sara was Convenor of the 26th biennial International Research Society for Children's Literature (IRSCL) 2023 Congress on Ecologies of Childhood, along with Dafna Zur (Stanford University) and a team of faculty, international scholars, graduate student, and PhD alumni organizers. The 2023 IRSCL Congress, which included 4 keynotes, 4 artist/author plenaries, 3 public humanities events, a mentoring lunch, and a Special Research Collections exhibition, took place at the University of California, Santa Barbara on August 12-15, 2023, and was the first time the IRSCL congress was held in the United States. It brought 300 scholars from over 30 countries to UCSB in person and included 100 more from over 40 countries digitally. The event program can be viewed here.

In March 2024, she co-organized, with Anna Lechintan, the virtual symposium Nabokov from Novel Perspectives. Earlier, in February 2016 she co-organized (with Sven Spieker) the symposium Nabokov's Idioms: Translating Foreignness in honor of Professor Emeritus D. Barton Johnson. She also arranged an international commemoration of the life of D. Barton Johnson in 2021.

In April 2021 she co-organized (with Sven Spieker) an interdisciplinary virtual conference (rescheduled and made virtual due to the pandemic) on Fallout: Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster at UCSB, which also included an interview with Director Holly Morris who directed "Babushkas of Chernobyl" in partnership with the Carsey-Wolf Center.