Sebastian Sobecki

Sebastian Sobecki is Professor of Later Medieval English Literature, University of Toronto, St George, with a cross-appointment in the Centre for Medieval Studies. He is a Fellow of the English Association and the Royal Historical Society, and has also held fellowships with All Souls College (Oxford), Harvard University, the Huntington Library, Magdalen College (Oxford), and Yale University. He is a recipient of the John Hurt Fisher Prize from the John Gower Society and has received research funding from SSHRC, the British Academy, Québec's FQRSC, the German Research Foundation (DFG), and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). His board memberships include The Journal of the Early Book Society, the Index of Middle English Prose, Maritime Humanities 1400-1800 (Routledge), and Texts and Transitions: Studies in the History of Manuscripts and Printed Books (Brepols). He is a former trustee of the Hakluyt Society and edited the journal Studies in the Age of Chaucer from 2018 until 2023. He currently serves as a trustee of the New Chaucer Society.

His research and teaching extend to a wide area of late medieval and early modern literature, with a focus on ideas of the self, life writing, and materiality in the literary history of the long fifteenth century. He is particularly interested in Chaucer, Hoccleve, Kempe, Lydgate, Skelton, and Hakluyt. Authorship, law, travel, manuscripts, and palaeography are central to his practice. His work has been covered widely by the press and media, including the BBC, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Guardian, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, the TLS. His essays have appeared in ELH, EHR, The Chaucer Review, Renaissance Studies, The Review of English Studies, SAC, and Speculum, among others. He has produced two volumes for the Oxford edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, 1598-1600 (forthcoming), and he is completing the edited volume A Global History of Medieval Travel Writing: European Perspectives (Cambridge UP). Ongoing editorial projects include The Cambridge History of London Literature: Vol. 1, The Beginnings to 1666 (Cambridge UP), with Stephanie Elsky, and, with Emily Steiner, The Oxford Handbook of Middle English Prose (Oxford UP). In addition to writing The Marvels of John Mandeville (Reaktion Books), completing the monograph The Invention of Colonialism: Richard Hakluyt and Medieval Travel Writing (Cambridge UP), and co-writing a book on Christine de Pizan with Misty Schieberle and Elizaveta Strakhov, he is working on two book-length studies, on Chaucer and authorial intention in fifteenth-century literature and on the handwriting and literary culture of London's bureaucratic clerks.