He has also taught at Williams College, Fairfield University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader (1998) and was the editor of the New Riverside Edition of Herman Melville’s Typee (2003). Professor Sanborn was the recipient of the 2005 Foerster Prize for best essay in American Literature; the 2002 Parker Prize for best essay in PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association of America; and the 1999 Cohen Award for best essay or chapter on Melville. Recent essays include studies of Frances Harper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Sandra Cisneros, and Emily Dickinson.