About Me
I grew up in a suburb of San Diego called Del Mar. After graduating from high school in 2005, I moved up to the Bay Area to attend college at UC Berkeley. (I am proud to be a product of California's public school system, having attended public school from Kindergarten through my doctoral degree!)
The first class I enrolled in at Berkeley was History 7A, the first half of the U.S. history survey. I became so enthralled by the course, and the way history was taught at the college level, that I declared my major in History as soon as bureaucratically possible. As a senior, I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Millie-Christine McKoy, conjoined twin women who performed in the freak show in the United States and Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. This project allowed me to begin exploring my interests in race, gender, popular culture, and the body.
After finishing my B.A. in 2009, I worked for one year before beginning my Ph.D. back at UC Berkeley. I was thrilled to be able to continue my studies in the same department that had first kindled my love for history. One of the best moments of my early years of graduate school was when I was assigned to work as a Graduate Student Instructor for History 7A — the same course that had made me a History major six years earlier. I filed my dissertation and completed my Ph.D. in May 2017. After teaching for two years as a Visiting Lecturer in the History Department, I joined the faculty of the American Studies Program.
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When I'm not teaching or writing, I enjoy cooking, hiking, camping, and consuming popular culture (especially TV and podcasts!).
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(One more note: My last name is legally two words: it is Gold McBride, not McBride. For this reason, it is incorrect to call me Sarah McBride. Wikipedia calls this a double-barrelled name, but I usually just tell people, "two words, no hyphen!")