Matthew Sergi, an Associate Professor of English, specializes in medieval English drama, performance, and play.  You can find the full online hub for his work here.

In the autumn of 2020, the University of Chicago Press published his first research monograph, Practical Cues and Social Spectacle in the Chester Plays, which reveals new evidence for early staging, design, and acting by combing through the extant texts of twenty-five short plays – based on reimagined (and sometimes very amusingly embellished) Bible stories – that hundreds of craftsmen and boys (and women?) produced on mobile wagon stages in the busiest streets of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Chester.  That book earned an Honorable Mention for the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society (MRDS)’s 2021 David Bevington Award for Best New Book in Early Drama Studies and another Honorable Mention for New York University’s 2022 Callaway Prize for Best Book on Drama and Theatre. He has also written numerous other publications and talks, receiving the MRDS 2016 Martin Stevens Award for Best New Essay in Early Drama Studies and the MRDS 2012 Barbara Palmer Award for Best New Essay in Early Drama Archival Research. 

Crucally, his research also takes form as live plays, bringing premodern English dramatic texts into present-day performances — most recently (as of spring 2026), he produced and directed a portable production of the medieval Welsh The Strong Man/Soul and Body, which performed both in Toronto and at the Oxford Renaissance Faire; before that, he was General Manager for the massive York Plays 2025 invitational performance, which brought over 200 performers together to produce 18.5 hours of continuous performance on replica medieval wagon stages on the U of T campus.  Matt's most recent publication, in Research on Medieval and Renaissance Drama/ROMARD, grows out of that project, as does the upcoming Special Issue of Early Theatre that he is editing. 

Matt is also Board Chair and President of PLS, a production company specializing in live research-based performances of early drama, where he periodically directs and produces live performances of medieval plays and hosts the monthly Medieval World Drama Working Group sponsored by the Jackman Humanities Institute; he is also on the editorial boards of Medieval English Theatre and Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance Drama and the Executive Board of the Records of Early English Drama.

See Matt's website, premodernity.net, for more.