Sarah Jessica Darley is undertaking a PhD in Literature, exploring contemporary fairy tale literature in the wake of Angela Carter. The provisional title for her research is: ‘Like the Wild Beasts, She Lives Without a Future’: The Afterlives of Angela Carter in Contemporary Fairy Tale Literature. Within the scope of her thesis, Sarah hopes to apply Carter's own 'demythologising' methodology to both her authorial-myth and the reception of Carter's fairy tale ouevre, allowing for new critical avenues to occur.

Sarah was an Associate Tutor on the first year undergraduate module Reading Now for the 22/23 LDC cohort.

Sarah's first publication can be found within the volume Cross-Cultural Influences Between Japanese and American Pop Cultures: POWERS OF POP (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023), ed. Dr. Kendra Nicole Sheehan. Her chapter - 'The Magical Girl Mirror: Reflections and Transcultural Transformations of Euro-American Fairy Tales in the Mahō Shōjo Genre' - surveys the complex cultural dialogue between Euro-American fairy tales and the mahō shōjo genre of Japanese media.

In June of 2023, Sarah presented her first paper '‘So she ran off the path and plunged into the woods’: Venturing into the Liminal Land of the Literary Fairy Tale' at Brown University, during their Norm and Transgression in the Fairy-Tale Tradition: (Non)Normative Identities, Forms, and Writings conference. 

Fairy tales, Folk tales, and Mythology. YA and Children's Literature. Speculative Fiction. Feminist Literature. Cultural Studies.