Assistant Professor, English J. D. Sargan (he/him) specializes in medieval English Literature, paleography, codicology, and the history of the book, and queer and trans approaches to these areas. He is the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook to the History of the Book in Medieval Western Europe, 650–1550 (forthcoming 2026) and of the medieval volume of A Cultural History of Trans Lives (forthcoming 2027).Dr Sargan’s first book project, Reading Early Middle English Books, is invested the multiplicity of partial literacies exhibited by readers of manuscripts from 1066–1300. In it he uses critical approaches to non-verbal evidence—marks, dirt, and the haptics of binding—to show that reading was a social act that extended the written word to those far beyond the limits of traditional considerations of literacy. His second book, Trans Histories of the Medieval Book: Experiments in Bibliography (forthcoming 2025), take a theoretical approach to traditional methods in the study of manuscripts, assessing their historical roots in imperialist intellectual traditions and proposes an alternative approach grounded in queer and trans liberation. An initial trial of this approach can be found in “What Could a Trans Book History Look Like? Toward Trans Codicology”, criticism 64.3-4 (2023). Dr Sargan teaches a class on Queer Bibliographies for California Rare Book School.
