Sarah Gilbreath Ford’s research and teaching focus on the literature of the American South, the gothic genre, African American literature, early American literature, and the work of Eudora Welty. She serves as the director of Baylor’s Beall Poetry Festival and as co-editor of the Eudora Welty Review. She is the author of Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic (2020), which examines how writers use gothic tools to combat slavery’s definition of people as property. Her book Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White (2014) examines how white and African American writers experiment with narrative form to replicate the dynamics of oral storytelling. She has also written articles on southern and early American writers for journals such as Studies in the Novel, Mississippi Quarterly, Early American Literature, and Southern Quarterly. She serves as affiliate faculty of the Environmental Humanities minor. She serves as the web editor of the Eudora Welty Society’s website. In 2018 she won the Welty society’s Phoenix Award for scholarship and service. In 2019 she was named a Baylor Centennial Professor.