A passion for life and learning

Here is the thing about envisioning someone who specializes in Chaucer. You automatically imagine that he wears a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, smokes a pipe and speaks slowly, deliberately and in a monotone.

What a relief then, to find out that David A. Lawton, Ph.D., professor and chair of the English department and one of the world’s leading Chaucer scholars, does none of those things.

He has a lovely English accent and a lively sense of humor, he hasn’t smoked for 16 years and gave up tweed eons ago.

The organizing principle of Lawton’s life has been passion: passion for travel, passion for writing and teaching, passion for family life and for doing the right thing.

Lawton was born in Manchester, England. His father died when Lawton was eight and his mother, “a feminist hero,” got her teaching degree in order to support the family. Lawton attended the University of Oxford (unusual in those days for a working-class student), where he majored in English. After getting a master’s degree, Lawton headed off to Turkey, where he served for two years in the British equivalent of the Peace Corps.

Then, after earning a doctorate in medieval culture from York University in England, Lawton decided to give Australia a try.

“I was only going to go for a year or two,” he says.

Lawton stayed 17 years, marrying Amanda Beresford, in 1982, and serving as reader (an academic position that is more research-focused than teaching-focused) and chair of the English Department at the University of Sydney.

A dedicated ‘greenie’

In Sydney, Lawton had an experience far from the purview of most academics: he became involved in politics. Because he and his wife had a home in the Blue Mountains, Lawton joined in an effort to save the mountains from developers who had planned an enormous hotel at the edge of a cliff.

The region has the largest canyon system in the world after the Grand Canyon, but unlike the Grand Canyon, the Blue Mounains are covered by rainforest.

“You get caught up in these community things,” he says of his foray into politics.

Originally, Lawton, a self-described “greenie,” was going to run the city council campaign of a Green candidate whose platform opposed development in the region. When the candidate dropped out, Lawton found himself running instead.

“I did what Green candidates are not supposed to do, I came in at the top of the polls,” he says with a laugh.

He ended up serving consecutive three-year terms, two years of which he was the deputy mayor.

Lawton successfully had the hotel moved well back from the edge of the cliff and started the process to declare the Blue Mountains a World Heritage site, making future development far more difficult. Lawton is understandably proud of his role, and is especially proud that there is a creek named for him in the Blue Mountains.

“The whole experience taught me an awful lot,” he says. “I learned to choose my fights, when to compromise and when to hold my ground.”

But the job was time consuming, and even dangerous.

“Things were contentious,” Lawton says. “I had the brakes on my car tampered with, and phone calls all through the night with death threats, and goodness knows what.”

Not a typical “ivory-tower” experience!

Lawton, determined to not become a lifelong politician, resigned his position in 1989.

“It was great fun,” he says of his experience. “I was proud that I stood up when I had to, but I served my term and I was ready for someone else to take a turn.”

After then living and working in Tasmania and England, Lawton was hired by Washington University.

The program here is exceptional, Lawton says, and there was the added benefit that he would see more of his family. In England, his job was three hours from his wife’s job, so he saw his family only on weekends. Lawton has been here since 1998 and been chair since 2002.

‘Evangelical’ teacher

So how did such a lively and engaging guy get interested in medieval literature and culture in the first place?

For one thing, Lawton thrives on challenges and risk, though usually only in the academic arena. He says he chose medieval literature because it was the toughest to understand; he established a new medieval literature journal to help others take similar risks; and he likes to shake things up.

Medieval culture is completely different, says Lawton, who also is the director of the Chaucer Society. You can’t assume that medieval England, for example, is anything like modern-day England. People’s identity, for one thing, was not specifically English. That designation meant little if anything. People identified themselves as European first and foremost; and the culture was multilingual.

“It is nice to be able to challenge students with the idea that they need to be able to speak more than one language in order to understand anything about the world around them,” he says.

Since arriving at the University, Lawton has initiated and supervised a shakeup of the required freshman writing course. He has broadened it to be a more writing-based course, with many different kinds of writing and writing exercises.

“I am absolutely evangelical about teaching people how to write in a way that enables them to think,” Lawton says. “I think teaching people to write is giving them a lifelong tool. Revamping the writing course is one of the most important things I’ve ever done.”

In addition to teaching undergraduates, Lawton was the director of graduate studies from 1999-2002, and has eight current graduate advisees. Lawton has supervised a total of 20 theses and has students in tenure-track positions in Australia, Britain, Japan and the United States.

“Advising graduate students is very special,” he says. “I’m very committed to that. It’s an extraordinary privilege when someone puts their future in your hands and again help them become different from you.”

Prolific, passionate writer

Lawton’s passion for writing was apparent from a young age. In his early 20s, he was a journalist for The Guardian. He has since written almost 50 journal articles and book chapters, four books (plus several books of 14th-century poetry he edited), and published poems “from time to time.”

And Lawton is not shy about taking on complicated or potentially sensitive subjects. His book Faith, Text and History looks at how the Bible is used to justify all sorts of un-brotherly behavior and beliefs. Lawton, who was raised “very Christian” but who doesn’t consider himself pious, has a purely academic interest in religion and religious differences.

“I am curious about the cultural roots of intolerance,” he says. “I’m particularly interested in how people read the Bible and the way that everybody that reads the Bible is quite convinced that theirs is the only way of reading it and they all dogmatically come to completely conflicting and opposite conclusions. My work is looking at the way different people read differently and saying, ‘Well, how the heck can this happen? What does this say about the way people read?’

“The study of literature is not escapist, it does have something to say about the way we behave toward each other and the way values are shaped over time and the way conflict happens over time.”

This kind of insight explains why Lawton is a popular guest on various Australian radio programs, where he speaks about literature and the role of religion in modern-day life and his impressions of religion in America.

Lawton tries to help others take on provocative or complicated subjects, as well. He recently co-founded a new journal, New Medieval Literatures, which, after only six issues, is one of the most widely cited journals in the field.

“We wanted people to do different sorts of essays,” Lawton says. “They may be in an experimental style, they may be too long, the subject may be too difficult to be placed easily in conventional journals.

“We opened this as a forum for people to be brave, you know, to take a few risks. Academics don’t take enough risks. It’s more fun if you take more risks, and that’s what the journal is about. It’s for people who want to take that sort of risk.”