OC’s Cami Agan enhances her scholarship through a sabbatical studying J.R.R. Tolkien’s work

The professor of language and literature hopes to finish editing a new volume of essays to be published this year.

March 5,2020 - Oklahoma Christian University Professor of Language and Literature Cami Agan was granted a sabbatical for the spring of 2020 to complete her research on J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Middle-earth.” She is editing a volume of collected essays entitled “Cities and Strongholds of Middle-earth,” to be published by the Mythopoeic Press. This editing requires reading all submissions for the volume, guiding the other researchers as they revise their chapters, in addition to writing the introduction and contributing a chapter to the volume. 

In 2020, Agan’s research took her to Paris, France where she will explore the final exhibition of “Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth” at the National Library of France and a parallel exhibition of Old English medieval manuscripts aligned with Tolkien's works. She is particularly interested in the maps Tolkien and his son drew of Middle-earth, how those maps and names of places changed over time and how ideas of geography and landscape construct meaning for the inhabitants and readers of his world. Later in the spring, she hopes to go to Oxford, England and read original manuscripts available in The Bodleian Library, which houses the second largest collection of Tolkein’s work in the world. Finally, she will travel to Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to briefly focus on Lord of the Rings materials in the later time frame.

Not only has her lifelong passion taken her all over the world, but it also plays a large role in her teaching career as she shares this research with her students.

“I hope to use the time away from the classroom to immerse myself fully in reading widely - considering Tolkien, but also considering new ways of approaching the material of the Elder Days,” Agan said. “[Notions introduced by French historian Michel De Certeau] have informed my scholarship on Tolkien since then, particularly his distinctions between place, a specific location on a map, and space, the movement of people through actions in place and eventually the creation of stories. It just proves what I tell my majors and students: research isn't about finding exactly what you're looking for, but about taking the time, allowing yourself to read widely and to be inspired into new ways of considering your texts and work.”

Agan looks forward to organizing future Tolkein-related trips, including scholarships for students to explore one of what she believes is “the most welcoming scholarly communities in academe.”