Sarah Higinbotham serves as a co-Principal Investigator of Beyond Bars and she studies and teaches Shakespeare and early modern literature at Emory’s Oxford College, focusing on the intersections of literature and law. She writes about the violence of the law in early modern England, critical prison theory, and human rights in literature. Her scholarship has appeared in Columbia Human Rights Law Review, Contemporary Justice Review, The Social History of Crime and Punishment in the United States, Law, Culture, and the Humanities, Wake Forest Law Review, and Reading Milton. As a way of exploring the constructive aspects of law, she co-authored a book through Oxford University Press, Human Rights and Children’s Literature: Imagination and the Narrative of Law.

Sarah teaches courses on Shakespeare and John Milton, law and literature, and surveys of English literature. She works with students who are interested in criminal justice reform and serves as Executive Director for a college-in-prison program in four Georgia prisons, Common Good Atlanta. Sarah was a Folger Shakespeare Library Residential Fellow in 2017 researching early modern juries, assize sermons, sentencing rubrics, judges’ notebooks, and legal records. She studied paleography at the Folger in 2018 and rare books at University of Virginia’s Rare Book School in 2019 and 2022.

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