ABOUT

Sarah Gold McBride is a historian and lecturer in the Program in American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

A historian of the social and cultural world of nineteenth-century United States, Dr. Gold McBride's research and teaching focus on the daily lives of ordinary Americans: the books and newspapers they read, the art and science they created, the plays and freak shows they attended, the museums and world's fairs they visited, and the information and objects they found meaningful as they tried to understand race, gender, and national identity.

Dr. Gold McBride grew up in Del Mar, CA, and twenty years ago she moved to the Bay Area to attend college at UC Berkeley. After graduating with a double major in History and Linguistics, she later returned to UC Berkeley for graduate school, receiving her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in History. She has been a member of UC Berkeley’s American Studies faculty since 2019.

Dr. Gold McBride has received several awards in recognition of her teaching and mentorship, including UC Berkeley’s Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of Graduate Student Instructors and the American Cultures Excellence in Teaching Award. She has presented on her research and teaching practice at conferences including the American Historical Association, Western Association of Women Historians, C19, and Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and has contributed book reviews to the Journal of Southern History, Journal of the Civil War Era, Panorama, and Reviews in American History.

Dr. Gold McBride lives in Concord, CA with her husband and two children. Whiskerology is her first book.