Paul L. Sawyer
Professor
Graduate Faculty Member
- Degrees
- Columbia University
Ph.D. - University of Michigan
B.A.
Bio
Before coming to Cornell University in 1975, Paul Sawyer lived eight years in New York as a student at Columbia University. He’s the author of Ruskin’s Poetic Argument (1985) and articles on Victorian literary prose, the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King, pornography, and other topics. His interests include the Victorian era, contemporary American cultural studies, writing pedagogy, and historical approaches to the study of literature. Since 2006 he’s been director of the Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines; he’s also an editor of the newsletter English at Cornell and a board member of Cornell’s Prison Education Project. His current projects include a book on Victorian criticism and aesthetic theory and a book on the literature and culture of the American 1960s.
Research and Teaching Interests
- Victorian literature
- Cultural studies
- Contemporary American literature, culture, and politics
- Writing pedagogy and community literacies
Current Projects
- Reading the Sixties (close readings in context of twelve seminal texts)
- Aesthetics, Criticism and Social Thought in Victorian Britain