Sarah Tobias's work bridges academia and public policy. A feminist theorist and LGBT activist, she is co-author of Policy Issues Affecting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Families (University of Michigan Press, 2007) and co-editor of Trans Studies: The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities (Rutgers University Press, 2016), which won the 2017 Sylvia Rivera Award for the Best Book in Transgender Studies from the City University of New York Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. With Nicole R. Fleetwood, she co-edited “The New Status Quo: Essays on Poverty in the United States and Beyond,” a special issue of Feminist Formations (Spring 2021).
Sarah is co-editor with Arlene Stein of The Perils of Populism (2022), Feeling Democracy: Emotional Politics in the New Millennium (2024), and Public Catastrophes, Private Losses (2025), all books in IRW’s Feminist Bookshelf series with Rutgers University Press. She is also the founding editor of Rejoinder, an online journal published by the Institute for Research on Women. Prior to joining IRW in January 2010, she spent over 8 years working in the nonprofit sector and also taught at Rutgers-Newark, the City University of New York (Baruch College and Queens College), and Columbia University. In addition to serving as Executive Director of IRW, Sarah is affiliate faculty in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at Rutgers. She has a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree from Cambridge University, England.