Sara Pankenier Weld earned her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures and a Ph.D. Minor in Comparative Literature at Stanford University in 2006. Her research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian literature, comparative literature, and Scandinavian literature; avant-garde literature, art, and theory; literatures of the north; word and image; childhood, children’s literature, and picturebooks.

Her publications include articles on works by the writers Daniil Kharms, Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vladimir Lebedev, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Maxim Gorky, which have appeared in the journals Slavic Review, Slavic and East European Journal, and Russian Language Journal, as well as in foreign publications. She is currently completing revisions of a book manuscript on the Infantile Aesthetic of the Russian avant-garde, which is an interdisciplinary study of Russian literature, art, and theory. Her next book project on Rare Books by Remarkable Russians mounts a close analysis of image and text in little-known picturebooks by prominent Russian writers.

Her teaching has encompassed Russian literature, culture, and language and comparative literature, both in her position as an assistant professor at Bard College and earlier at Wellesley College, Dartmouth College, and Stanford University. She has received a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship and a Dickey Center Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her teaching has been recognized by a Lieberman Fellowship in the Humanities and a Centennial Teaching Award at Stanford University.