Dr Seamus Dwyer, Faculty of English
sd2168@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
I am a Teaching Associate in Medieval Literature in the Faculty of English. My roots are in New York City and Newfoundland, and I completed my BA at Memorial University of Newfoundland. I went on to do graduate work at the University of Oxford, and I completed my PhD at Yale University. Before coming to Cambridge, I taught at Yale, Smith College, and Central Connecticut State University, where my classes addressed topics in Old and Middle English literature, pre-modern world literature, and writing about teen angst.
Research Interests
My research focuses on medieval manuscripts, scribal practices, and how the visual and physical features of material texts allow us to understand literature. My current book project considers various late medieval scripts (the manuscript version of typographical fonts), and explores how the visual characteristics and cultural connotations of medieval handwriting facilitate new ways of reading and interpreting literature across medieval England's three literary languages, English, French, and Latin. I also write and teach about medieval ideas of labour and social position, and I'm particularly interested in how medieval manuscripts and scribal arts functioned in the broader social world within various classed and gendered contexts. Related to all of this, I have vested interests in medieval multilingualism as it relates to lyric and lyric theory, literary compilation, and manuscript production.
Selected Publications
'Bastard Hands: Paleographical Terminology, Fifteenth-Century Scripts, and the Process of Medieval Making', Papers for the Bibliographical Society of America, 118:3, (2024), 315-347.
[with Candace Barrington] 'Dilapidated Medievalism in Gwendolyn Brooks's "The Anniad"', in Suzanne Edwards and Matthew Vernon, eds., Women's Restorative Medievalisms (Arch Humanities Press, 2024), 55-72.
'Reading the Tied Letters of Cotton Nero A.x.', The Review of English Studies, 74:313 (2023), 16-30.
