Dr. Tormey has taught in the English Department in various roles since 1995, earning his doctorate in 2008. A scholar of Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature by training, he maintains interests in these fields as well as in Milton Studies, the epic tradition, economic, scientific and technical history, ecocriticism, sports literature, popular culture, and technical writing. He serves the department primarily by teaching upper division Medieval and Renaissance Literature survey classes and Special Topics courses (both live and online) on American Environmental Literature and Nature Writing, and on Science Literature. He has publications on Milton, Spenser, John Evelyn, the Anglo-Saxon Herbals, Medieval Blacksmiths, and on Rachel Carson. He taught in the "Great Books in Tennessee Prisons" Program from 2007 to 2014. 

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Edited Books  

• Baseball and Social Class.  Essays on the Democratic Game That Isn’t.  Eds. Ronald E. Kates and Warren Tormey.  McFarland & Company, 2012.  
• Baseball/Literature/Culture:  Essays 2008-2009.  Eds. Ronald  E. Kates and Warren Tormey.  McFarland & Company, 2010.  
• Baseball/Literature/Culture:  Essays 2006-2007.  Eds. Ronald E. Kates and Warren Tormey.   McFarland & Company, 2008.  

Article Publications 

• “Swords as Medieval Icons and Early Global ‘Brands,’” Globalism in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age:  Innovative Approaches and Perspectives, ed. Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandige.  Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture 27(2023). Berlin:  DeGruyter, 147-88. 
• “Wholeness, Holiness, and Wonderous Healing:  Formulaic Performativity in the Anglo Saxon Herbal Healing Guides,” Mediaevistik:  Internationale Zeitschrift für Interdisziplinäre Mittelalterforschung 35(2022).  Berlin:  Peter Lang, 63-88.
• “The Transformation of Gehenna:  Taking the Biblical Wasteland into the Prison House of Hell,” Freedom, Imprisonment, and Slavery in the Pre-Modern World: Cultural-Historical, Social-Literary, and Theoretical Reflections. Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture (25), ed. Albrecht Classen. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2021: 59-87 
•  “Finding Refuge in a Shared Preference for Primals and Elementals: Exploring the Literary Friendship Between Henry Beston and Rachel Carson," ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2021; isab011, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isab011  
• “Otherworldly Pilgrims: The Hell Tour and the Establishment of (Continental) Christian Territoriality on the Anglo-Saxon and Irish Peripheries,” Imagination and Fantasy in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Projections, Dreams, Monsters, and Illusions, Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture (24), ed. Albrecht Classen. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2020: 321-54. 
• "Understanding Monastic Recreations and Luxury within the Anglo-Saxon Patristic Tradition,"  Pleasure and Leisure in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age:  Cultural-Historical Perspectives on Toys, Games, and Entertainment, Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture (23), ed. Albrecht Classen. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2019:  267-286.
• "'Eden rais'd in the wast Wilderness': Post-Postlapsarian Landscaped in Paradise Regain'd," Critical Insights: Paradise Lost, ed. Robert C. Evans. Amenia, New York: Grey House Publishing--Salem Press, 2019: 82-101
• “Teaching Rachel Carson Within the Traditions of Wonder,” Studies in Popular Culture (41.1), Fall 2018.  
• “The Journey within the Journey: Catabasis and Travel Narrative in Late Medieval and Early Modern Epic,” Travel, Time, and Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time:  Explorations of World Perceptions and Process of Identity Formation. Fundamentals of Early Modern Culture (21), eds. Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge. Berlin and New York: Walter De Gruyter, 2018:  585-621
• “Magical (and Maligned) Metalworkers: Understanding Representations of Early and High Medieval Blacksmiths,” Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time. Fundamentals of Early Modern Culture (20), eds. Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge. Berlin and New York: Walter De Gruyter, 2017: 109-48.      
• “Treating Evil in the Anglo-Saxon Herbals,” Bodily and Spiritual Hygiene in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Fundamentals of Early Modern Culture (19), eds. Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge. Berlin and New York: Walter De Gruyter, 2017: 88-113.  
• “Recent Studies in John Evelyn,” ed. Elizabeth Hageman. English Literary Renaissance 64.3 (July 2016): 314-29.  
• “On the Edges of Settlement:  Propagandizing Colonial Hegemony and Realizing Social Mobility in Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” Medieval Perspectives 30 (2015): 127-48.  
• “’The Old College Try’: Eddie Collins and the 1919 Black Sox,” Baseball and Social Class:  Essays on the Democratic Game That Isn’t, Eds. Ronald E. Kates  and Warren Tormey.  McFarland & Company, 2012: 98-111.  
• “Milton’s Satan and Early English Industry and Commerce: The Rhetoric of Self-Justification,”  Interdisciplinary Literary Studies:  A Journal of Criticism and Theory. 13.1-2 (Fall 2011): 127-59.   
• “Putting the Ball Cap on James Joyce:  Beer and Bars, and Echoes of Ulysses in Coover’s Universal Baseball Association,” Baseball/Literature/Culture:  Essays 2008-2009.  Eds. Ronald E. Kates and Warren Tormey.  McFarland & Company, 2010: 125-40.  
• “Author Wiggen:  More than Just a Name,” Baseball/Literature/Culture:  Essays 2006- 2007.  Eds. Ronald E. Kates and Warren Tormey. McFarland & Company, 2008: 32-39.
• "'You Don't Play the Angles, You're a Sap:' John Sayles, Eliot Asinof, Baseball, Labor, and Chicago in 1919," Baseball/Literature/Culture: Essays 2002-2003. Ed. Peter Carino. McFarland & Company, 2004: 60-75.  
• Review of “This is the City-State”: The Idea of the Guardian in the TV LAPD by Xerxes Havelock. Teleparody: Predicting/Preventing the TV Discourse of Tomorrow.  Eds. David Lavery and Angela Hague. London: Wallflower Press, 2002: 33-39.  
• "Discipline and Dilbert," Studies in Popular Culture, 21.1 (October 1998): 13-29.    

Book Reviews:  

• John Dixon Hunt, John Evelyn:  A Life of Domesticity (London: Reaktion Books, 2017), reviewed for Journal of British Studies 58.1 (January 2019), 191-93.  

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International Symposium on Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Tucson, AZ)  

• “Envisioning Monastic Recreations in the Anglo-Saxon Patristic Tradition” (2018)
• “The Journey within the Journey: Catabasis and Travel Narrative in Early Modern Epic” (2017)
• “Magical (and Maligned) Metalworkers:  Understanding Representations of Early and High Medieval Blacksmiths” (2016)  
• “Treating the Condition of Evil in the Anglo-Saxon Herbals” (2015)  

Sewanee Medieval Colloquium (Sewanee, TN)  

• “Wholeness, Holiness, and Wondrous Healing:  The Idea of Wellness in Anglo-Saxon Medicine” (Spring, 2014)  

Southeastern Medieval Association  

• “The Scriptural Origins of Christian Catabasis,” Charleston SC (2017)
• “Elves, Evil and Echoes of the Pre-Christian Underworld,” Knoxville, TN (2016)
• “Confronting the Demonic in the Anglo-Saxon Patristic Tradition,” Little Rock, AR (2015)
• “On the Edges of Settlement:  The Faerie Queene’s Books IV-VI, The Mutabilitie Cantos, and the Fall of Spenser’s Estate,” Boone, NC (2013)
• “Structure and Knowledge:  ‘The Knight’s Tale,’ ‘The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale,’ and the Problem of Universals,” Atlanta, GA (2011)  

International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, MI)  

• “Classical Herbalism and Christian Proselytizing:  The Case of Cotton Vitellius Ciii” (2013)
• "The Cave and the Tower: Prison, Vision, and the Philosopher’s Gaze in ‘The Knight’s Tale’ and The Consolation of Philosophy" (2010)  

Conference on John Milton (Murfreesboro, TN—Brimingham AL)  

• “Armed Saints and Devilish Engines:  Milton’s Martial Millenarianism” (2017)
• “’On what thou hast of vertue, summon all’: Claiming Hortulian Virtues in Paradise Lost” (2015)  
• “’The Wilderness/ For Thee is Fittest Place’:   Post-postlapsarian Landscapes in Paradise Regain’d” (2013)
• “‘Sea-faring men o’erwacht’:  John Milton, Bureaucrat, the Council of State, and the Navigation Acts of 1651”  (2011)  
• “’All My Trees thir Prey’:  Surveyorship, Paradise Lost, and the Reafforestation acts of 1668”  (2009)
• “Milton’s Satan and Early English Industry and Commerce: The Rhetoric of Self-Justification”  (2007)            

Popular Culture Association of America  

• “Medievalizing Modernism:  Jacoba de Felice and the Rhetoric of Power,” Washington DC (2013)
• “Processed Nostalgia:  The Industrialization of Pie-Making,”  San Francisco, CA (2008)
• “A Pub in My Kitchen:  Jamie Oliver’s Third Place,” San Diego, CA (2006)
• "Discipline and Dilbert,"  Orlando, FL (1998)  

Baseball in Literature and Culture Conference (Terre Haute, IN—Murfreesboro, TN—Ottawa, KS)  

• ‘”What’s the Odds?’:  Hal Chase and Gambling—Contemporary Accounts” (2018)
• “Chick Gandil:  Multi-Sport Athlete and Middle Class Stalwart” (2017)
• “Containing Competitiveness and Finding Salvation in the Vintage Game”  (2015)
• “Atlantics-Irvingtons, 1866-67:  19th Century Baseball’s Unlikely Post-Civil War Rivalry” (2014)
• “August 23, 1860:  The Day Baseball Fell” (2013)
• “John Milton, Ballplayer:  How England’s Pre-Industrial Epic Shaped America’s Pastoral Game” (2012) 
• “Saved by the Short Porch:  Ballpark (Re)Configuration in the 1920s and 1990s” (2011)
• “’The Old College Try’:  Eddie Collins and the 1919 Black Sox” (2010)  
• “Putting the Ball Cap on James Joyce:  Beer and Bars, and Echoes of Ulysses in Robert Coover’s Universal Baseball Association” (2009)
• "I Could Look Up:  Reflections on My Adolescent Obsession with Baseball Statistics, as Enabled by The Sports Encyclopedia of Baseball" (2005)
• "’Author Wiggen’:  More than Just A Name"  (2004)
• "'You Don't Play the Angles, You're a Sap':  Baseball, Labor, and Chicago in 1919" (2002)
• "Reading the Narrative of the Baseball Game"  (2000) “Pre-Industrial Body Metaphors in Baseball Literature” (1999)  

Popular Culture Association of the South  

• “River Journeys and Dam Projects,” Savannah GA (2017)
• “Rachel Carson and the Significance of Wonder,” Nashville TN (2016)
• “Understanding the Appeal of the “Penitent Predator” Narrative,” Wilmington NC (2015)         
• “The Athlete’s Death and Writer’s Birth: Writer-athletes and the Narrative of Athletic Experience,” Savannah GA (2007).
• "Televised Exercise and the Rhetoric of Salvation,"  Savannah GA (1997)  

Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association  

• “Chaucer’s Metaphorical Prisons in Boece and The Knight’s Tale,”  Jackson Hole, WY (1994)
• “Representing Medical Practice in the Romances of Chrétien de Troyes,” Flagstaff, AZ (1993)  

New Directions in Critical Theory Conference (Tucson, AZ)  

• “’The Book of Guinnesses’:  Beer, Breweries, and Transmigration in Joyce’s Ulysses ” (1994)  

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Upper Division Courses taught:  

• English 3010         Br. Lit.: Beg. to 1700 (online version)    Spring 2019 (initial offering)
• English 3010         British Literature: Beg. to 1700             2017-Present
• English 3620         Professional Writing                             1997-Present
• English 3620         Professional Wrtg. (online version)        2012-Present
• English 3605         Applied Writing                                    2006-Present
• English 3605         Applied Writing (online version)             2012-Present

Lower Division Courses taught:             

• English 2020         Unblinded!...By Science.                     Fall 2017-Present
• English 2020         Modern Amer. Nature Writing (online vers.) Spring 2018-Present
• English 2020         Modern Amer. Nature Writing               2016-Present
• English 2020         Mod. Amer. Env. Lit (online version)     2015-Present
• English 2020         Mod. American Environmental Lit.        2011-Present        
• English 2330         Sports in Literature                            1998-2004         
• English 2130         American Literature Survey                1997-2004
• English 2030         Sophomore Literature Survey              1995-Present
• English 1020         Rsch. and Arg. Writing                        1995-Present
• English 1010         Expository Writing                              1996-Present

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