Sebastian Sobecki is Professor of Later Medieval English Literature, University of Toronto, St George, with a cross-appointment in the Centre for Medieval Studies and a fellowship at Victoria College. 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 Index of Middle English Prose, The Journal of the Early Book Society, 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 co-edits the book series Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature and 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 law, travel, authorship, and institutions in the literary history of the long fifteenth century. He is particularly interested in Chaucer, Hoccleve, Kempe, and London’s literary culture. Manuscripts and palaeography are central to his practice. His work has been covered widely by the press and media, including the BBC, the CBC's The National and the Morning Show, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Guardian, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the TLS. His essays have appeared in, among others, ELH, EHR, SAC, Renaissance Studies, The Review of English Studies (three times), Speculum (four times), and The Chaucer Review (five times). He has produced two volumes for the Oxford edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, 1598-1600 (forthcoming), and he is preparing The Cambridge History of the Literature of London: 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 co-writing a book on Christine de Pizan with Misty Schieberle and Elizaveta Strakhov (The Mother of English Literature, Cambridge UP), he is writing a book on Thomas Hoccleve and one on medieval English handwriting.

He currently holds a UofT–UParis Cité grant for a database on female travellers in medieval and early modern Eurasia (with co-PI Ladan Niayesh) and he is the PI of the SSHRC Insight Grant Communities of Practice: Scripts, Scribes, and the Production of Literature in London, 1377-1471 which combines machine learning with traditional palaeography.