Sarah Tolmie

Sarah Tolmie, an Associate Professor in the department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo, is a traditionally-trained, philologically-oriented medievalist with a Masters degree from the University of Toronto and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. She’s published articles on the post-Chaucerian poet Thomas Hoccleve and on Middle Scots literature. Sarah’s teaching of Langland to undergraduates led to a series of articles on Langland and Wittgenstein and the role of logic in Piers Plowman; then to the development of a “wearable poem” in virtual reality called the Salvation Suit, an immersive translation of Langland’s full text; and finally to a growing interest in embodied cognition in many forms, both scholarly and performative.

Sarah is also a creative writer, with a speculative fiction novel, The Stone Boatman, set to be published in 2013. In October 2012 she received an Ontario Arts Council in-progress grant to support a novel-length sonnet sequence called Trio. This work is strongly influenced by the dance form known as contact improvisation, which she has been practicing for the past two years. Her interest in contact improvisation led to her co-founding the Raw Nerve Research Group, a research creation collective that uses this form in workshops to analyze the structure of complex interactions.