Sara's first book Voiceless Vanguard: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde, an interdisciplinary study of Russian literature, art, and theory, was published in 2014 by Northwestern University Press as part of its Studies in Russian Literature and Theory series and supported by the Mellon Slavic Studies Initiative. It received the International Research Society for Children's Literature (IRSCL) Book Award in 2015. It was also on the long list for the 2016 Historia Nova Prize for Best Book on Russian Intellectual and Cultural History and was nominated for the 2016 American Association for Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) 2016 Best Book in Literary/Cultural Studies. It has been reviewed by Slavic Review, The Russian Review, Modern Language Review, International Research in Children's Literature, and Barnboken- Journal of Children's Literature Research. It was published in Russian translation as Безречие авангарда: Эстетика инфантилизма в русском авангарде by Библиороссика, Bibliorossica of Academic Studies Press in 2023.

Sara's second book, An Ecology of the Russian Avant-Garde Picturebook, which mounts a close analysis of image and text in little-known picturebooks by prominent Russian writers, artists, and intellectuals, was published in 2018 by John Benjamins as volume 9 in the award-winning Children's Literature, Culture, and Cognition series. It has been reviewed in The Lion and the Unicorn, Slavic Review, and Libri & libreri, among others.

She is currently completing a book project entitled Miniature Revelations: Childhood in Nabokov's Writings. It argues that throughout Nabokov's work, the neglected and inscrutable child, who might be mistaken for a marginal figure, in fact offers a miniature revelation and key to Nabokov's novels that enables a reevaluation of his texts. Her next book project is entitled Alice to Adaland, or Nabokov Through the Looking Glass and traces the multifaceted and lifelong impact on Nabokov's oeuvre of Lewis Carroll's Alice books, the first of which Nabokov translated into Russian in his early literary career as Ania v strane chudes (1922).

Her work has been moving in new comparative directions in North American and Scandinavian contexts. She recently published an article in a new area entitled "Survival, Sustenance, and Self-Sufficiency: Taking a Plant-Based Perspective in Jean Hegland's Into the Forest" in a special issue of Ecozona: European Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Environment (2024) and earlier published an article entitled "Sámi Selves in the Northern Landscape: Nomadism and Indigeneity in Swedish Classics for Children" in Barnelitterært forskningstidsskrift (2020).

A book chapter on transnational aspects of Catherine the Great's writings for children was published in Transnational Books for Children, 1750-1900 (John Benjamins, 2023), edited by Charlotte Appel, Nina Christensen, and Matthew Grenby, while a chapter on childhood and temporality in Svetlana Alexieviech's Chernobyl Prayer appeared in Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood: Myths and Realities (Routledge, 2023), edited by Marina Balina, Larissa Rudova, and Anastasia Kotsteskaya. 

Previous book chapters include “The Production of the Man-Machine: The Child as Instrument of Futurity” in Pedagogy of Images (Toronto University Press, 2021), edited by Marina Balina and Serguei Oushakine and “The Child’s-Eye View of War in Ivan’s Childhood" in ReFocus: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky (University of Edinburgh Press, 2021), edited by Sergey Toymentsev. She published a chapter in the volume Children's Literature and the Avant-Garde (John Benjamins, 2017) edited by Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, which won the Children's Literature Association (ChLA) Edited Book Award in 2017 and the IRSCL Edited Book Award in 2017.

She has published numerous articles or chapters on a variety of Russian and East European historical figures like Catherine the Great; filmmakers Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Eisenstein; writers Svetlana Alexievich, Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Daniil Kharms, Samuil Marshak, and Vladimir Nabokov; and artists Vladimir Lebedev and Mikhail Tsekhanovsky. She has also written on Scandinavian topics and Indigeneity in a Scandinavian context and about the writers Selma Lagerlöf and Laura Fitinghoff and is pursuing new research on Martha Sandwall-Bergström and Astrid Lindgren. Her articles have appeared in the journals Slavic Review, Slavic and East European Journal, and Russian Language Journal, as well as in foreign publications like Scando-Slavica, Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, Detskie chteniia, Nedslag i børnelitteraturforskningen, Barnelitterært forskningstidsskrift, Barnboken, Antropologicheskii forum, International Research in Children's Literature, and Ecozona, in English, Danish, Russian, and Swedish.