BA (UWO), MA (Trent), PhD (York)
Dr Sarah Clift holds a BSc and a BA from the University of Western Ontario, an MA in methodologies from Trent University and a PhD in social and political thought from York University. She also holds a doctoral diploma in German and European Studies from the Centre for German & European Studies (York University/UQAM).
In her doctoral work, Dr Clift traces the conceptualization of memory at the heart of modern philosophy in order to question the assumption of the loss of radical futurity in the philosophical/theoretical tradition. The dissertation was awarded York University’s 2009 President’s Prize for best doctoral thesis and was York’s nomination for the UMI American dissertation prize.
Dr. Clift is Co-Founder (with Dr. Laura Penny) of the youth initiative, Humanities for Young People. She is also active as an award-winning translator of French and German contemporary theory and as a cultural theorist. Dr. Clift’s current work involves the work of Hannah Arendt, Günther Anders, and Michael Rothberg, and examines the wide-ranging effects of the shift from a focus on perpetrators to a focus on victims in discussions of criminal and social justice.
Dr Clift is also a participating researcher and collaborator in the joint King’s/NSCAD project, “Memory Activism and Collaborative Process of Counter-Monumentality,” which seeks to bring artists and contemporary culture theorists together to research collective memory, disruptive narratives, and artistic practice.
Selected Publications
- Committing the Future to Memory: Experience, History, Trauma. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.
- “Regarding the Image (on Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Ground of the Image),” Poiesis 10, 2008.
- “Narrative life-span, in the wake.” Biopolitics, Narrative, Temporality. Eds. Rod Frey and Alexander Ruch. Polygraph 18 (2006): 13-45.
- “Impossible Testimony: Figures of Memory in Locke’s Essay.” Inventing the Past: Memory Work in Culture and History. Basel: Schwabe Press, 2005: 159-179.
- “Testimony in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” Poiesis 4, 2002: 114-129.
Selected Translations
- Jean-Luc Nancy, Excluding the Jew within Us, London: Polity Press, 2020. Translation from French
- Aleida Assmann, Is Time out of Joint? On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. Translation from German
- Jean-Luc Nancy, Portrait, New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Translation from French
- Aleida Assmann, Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity, New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Translation from German
