Sarah Coleman is an Associate Professor of History at Texas State University. She specializes in modern U.S. history, with particular interests in political history, immigration and public policy. Dr. Coleman is the author of The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2021), an award-winning book that examines how immigrant rights have been debated and defined in American politics and policymaking since the mid-twentieth century. Her current book project explores Congressional history and the political power of Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn.
She received her BA from Yale University, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in History from Princeton University. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. Prior to academia, she worked in the White House and in the United States Senate.
Outside the classroom and archives, she lives in Austin with her husband and two children. By day she reads nonfiction for work; by night she happily escapes into fiction—often drawn from the stack of novels she brings home each year from the Texas Book Festival.