I’m Tom Sawyer, and I lecture in the Writing Program 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. I aim to prepare students to communicate effectively to a broad array of audiences while expressing themselves confidently in their own voices. My seminars blend technical instruction with open discourse.

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

My first monograph, The Making and Meaning of A Medieval Manuscript: Interpreting MS Bodley 851, is available for pre-order now! This study 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 Spring 2025, 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.”

When I am not working on books, I am working on games – primarily tabletop board games – as a critic and as a designer. At UChicago, I will host Medievalists Design Games, a collaborative event between academic specialists and game-design experts intended to create prototype games for educational use and in hobbyist spaces. Together, we will query opportunities for historical representation and agential fashioning in games and play that are current in the academy and in the public sphere.

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