Sarah Lirley

Dr. Sarah Lirley is an Associate Professor of History at Columbia College. She specializes in the history of women and gender, nineteenth-century U.S. history, and the history of death and death investigations. Her 2024 book, Sudden Deaths in St. Louis: Coroner Bias in the Gilded Age, emphasizes those topics. She has also written articles and blog entries about coroners’ inquests in late nineteenth-century St. Louis. She is currently working on a new project that examines coroners’ jury inquests in St. Louis between 1875 and 1900, with a particular focus on a domestic homicide in which the husband escaped murder charges.