Sarah Dowling's research and teaching focus on language politics, settler colonialism, and contemporary writing. She is especially interested in poems written between and across languages. In her first scholarly book, Translingual Poetics, she argues that such works deepen the linguistic density of other literatures in order to refute the easy equivalencies of formal legal equality and the familiar narratives of a meritocratic, colorblind present. The primary goal of her scholarship is to show how relevant and exciting this seemingly obscure kind of poetry can be: she suggests that texts by Myung Mi Kim, Layli Long Soldier, M. NourbeSe Philip, and others respond to the state’s coercive forms of clarity with critical dissonance. They ask us to listen beyond the status quo in order to hear what is excluded from our linguistic common ground.