I’m Tom Sawyer, a writing specialist at The University of Chicago. I earned my Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis in 2021.

As an instructor of writing, I am committed to developing innovative, equitable approaches to the teaching of writing across the curriculum in both reader-centered and process-centered modes. I aim to prepare students to communicate effectively to a broad array of audiences while expressing themselves confidently in their own voices.

As a scholar of the Middle Ages and literary comparatist, my research focuses on medieval miscellany manuscripts and their textual arrangements. I primarily deal with Anglo-Latin and Middle English poetry of the twelfth through fourteenth centuries. When I’m feeling adventurous, I sometimes dabble in the fifteenth, sixteenth, or – on days propitious for ambition – seventeenth centuries as well!

My first monograph, Manuscript Meaning: Making MS Bodley 851, develops a book-historical method for reading medieval mixed-content manuscripts as complex literary artifacts. Relying upon material evidence for how scribes collected, distributed, and arranged texts in physical form, I ask how individual manuscripts themselves preserve and generate knowledge about literature. Throughout this study in method, I discuss one manuscript at length: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 851. Bodley 851 is a positively zany composite textual object that lets me talk about two infamous, uproarious, inscrutable texts at the same time – Walter Map’s De nugis curialium and William Langland’s Piers Plowman (in its infamous “Z-text” redaction). The recovery of dispersed scribal labor within Bodley 851 informs my analysis of the texts still preserved within its bindings.

I have also begun to expand my miscellaneous repertoire after a systematic fashion, in a data-driven project provisionally titled Codicological Categories in Medieval England. There, I ask how practices of material and textual compilation, considered in the aggregate, calcified in the formation of modern genres. I am especially interested in the perspective we gain from those oft-copied (by medieval scribes) and little-read (by modern scholars) poems often inefficiently termed “goliardic,” and how they function as members of a broad and complex manuscript network. In AY 2024-25, I will take up a New Chaucer Society Early Career Fellowship at the Bodleian Libraries in order to pursue one key plank of this book project, provisionally titled “Goliardic Networks.”

With Arthur Bahr and Zachary Hines, I am co-editing a special issue of English Language Notes on “Metaphors of Compilation.”

Thank you for stopping by this website of mine. As improvements are necessary, improvements will be made. Until then, know that it’s comforting, to me, to know I exist – and now you know too! The world is full of wonders.

--Tom