Sarah is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Notre Dame, where she is a tutor and casual lecturer in the Department of Media, Writing & Journalism. Her research looks at the way that Australian YA novels interrogate stereotypical representations and assumptions of teen girls from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

Sarah has presented research papers at local and international conferences. Some brief abstracts are below:

• What-If? Reading World of Possibility Conference (Sydney University):
  Sarah Ayoub discusses how gender and power operate within classic tropes of commercial romantic narratives. It explores how Jamie McGuire’s NYT best-selling novel Beautiful Disaster typifies conventions of the traditional romance genre, where a male suitor’s violent tendencies are symbols of the depth and power of his love, and how the outwardly-innocent but coquettish behaviour of the virgin female is at the heart of an exchange of power with the domineering male lead. It questions the viability of such relationships if sex and power weren’t at the centre, and re-writes a relationship that might be otherwise ordinary but not at all devoid of love. 
• Australasian Children’s Literature Association for Research (Victoria University of Wellington, NZ):
  Young Adult (YA) Literature has traditionally been predicated upon coming of age narratives, and multicultural literature, with its struggle of diasporic identity, has typified this personal identity formation. For years, Australian YA has educated readers in the diversity of its people by challenging stereotypes of minority characters and as a result, now enjoys a place in #ownvoices and #weneeddiversebooks movements that are taking place in schools, writer’s festivals and social media campaigns around the world. This paper draws on the subversive representations of minority identities – as they are portrayed in Australian YA – by analysing the construction of the ethnic female teen through the frameworks of race, class and gender within the narrative of three award-winning YA novels published over three decades – Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi (1992), Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Does my head look big in this? (2005), and Alice Pung’s Laurinda (2013). 
• Gender + Identity Symposium (LaTrobe University, Melbourne):
  As a genre, multicultural Australian YA fiction “carries with it an implicit pedagogy about race relations in Australia, which has the potential to subvert oppressive binary dualisms of race and gender by demonstrating possibilities for the development of hybrid cultural identities” (Zannettino 2007:96). This paper will highlight how the intersectionality of race, class and gender in the narratives of multicultural YA novels facilitates various performances of identity in the negotiation of otherness. It will analyse the way that acts of resistance in the face of marginalisation and stereotype are performed differently according to gender, by exploring and contrasting the hypermasculine hybrid identities in Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Lebs (2018) and Helen Chebatte’s Bro (2016), with that of the more subtle, though powerful, feminine resistances in Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Does my Head look big in this (2005) and Alice Pung’s Laurinda (2014).
• Australian Association of Writing Programs Conference (Curtin University, Perth):
  Contemporary YA narratives challenge mainstream society’s stereotypical assumptions about racialised minorities and a growing body of contemporary children’s fiction addresses the issues of displaced children and “actively dissents against” government policies of mandatory detention (Dudek 2006:185). This body of literature is seen to foster empathy in readers for minorities and displaced peoples, making “the impersonal personal and the abstract immediate” (Parsons 2016:20). This paper will explore the ways that a number of contemporary YA texts are modes of resistance, activism and empathy, by highlighting how the constructions of race, class, gender and circumstance intersect to create hybrid identities that facilitate an understanding of otherness while mediating social change in Morris Gletizman’s Boy Overboard (2002) and Clare Atkins’ Between Us (2017).