Paul Sawyer

Paul Sawyer has been a member of the English Department at Cornell University for thirty-two years and Director of the Knight Institute since 2006.  He graduated from the University of Michigan and received his doctoral degree from Columbia. His interest in social and formal aspects of prose style dates from that time. He came to the Cornell English department as a specialist in Victorian nonfiction prose, and his book Ruskin’s Poetic Argument:  The Design of the Major Works came out from Cornell University Press in 1985.   John Ruskin was a brilliant stylist and polymath who combined in equal and, ultimately, unstable degree a passion for imaginative experience and social justice.  In the 1990s Paul Sawyer brought together those same passions by moving from the British Victorian era to American cultural studies, teaching courses like “Politics and Culture in the 1960s” and “Writing on the Left since the 1960s,” both of which put fiction, polemic, music, film, and other genres in conversation, and both of which attempt to connect academic learning with learning to become citizens of the world. He’s also written on pornography, the South Asian novel, Martin Luther King, and “media literacy” as a form of writing teaching.   As Director of the Knight Institute, he’s worked to maintain and expand connections among disciplines and their practitioners; to develop the Institute’s tutoring program; and to envision new ways to extend our outreach beyond the walls of the academy.