Rate My Professor Sebastian Sobecki

Sebastian Sobecki is Professor of Later Medieval English Literature at the University of Toronto, St. George campus, with a cross-appointment in the Centre for Medieval Studies. He holds a BA, MPhil, and PhD from the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, he taught for two years at Bochum University in Germany. Sobecki is a Fellow of the English Association and the Royal Historical Society. He has held fellowships at All Souls College, Oxford; Harvard University; the Huntington Library; Magdalen College, Oxford; and Yale University. He received the John Hurt Fisher Prize from the John Gower Society and the 2024 Dean’s Research Excellence Award from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts & Science. His research has been supported by grants from SSHRC, the British Academy, FQRSC, the German Research Foundation, and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. He serves on the boards of the Index of Middle English Prose, The Journal of the Early Book Society, Maritime Humanities 1400-1800, and Texts and Transitions. Sobecki is a former trustee of the Hakluyt Society, edited Studies in the Age of Chaucer from 2018 to 2023, co-edits the Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature series, and is a trustee of the New Chaucer Society. His research focuses on late medieval and early modern English literature, with particular attention to law and literature, travel writing, authorship, institutions, Chaucer, Hoccleve, Margery Kempe, and London’s literary culture. Manuscripts and palaeography are central to his work. He has authored books including The Invention of Colonialism: Richard Hakluyt and Medieval Travel Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England (Oxford University Press, 2019), Medieval English Travel: A Critical Anthology (Oxford University Press, 2019, with Anthony Bale), Unwritten Verities: The Making of England’s Vernacular Legal Culture, 1463–1549 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), and The Sea and Medieval English Literature (D.S. Brewer, 2008). He has edited or co-edited numerous volumes, including The Cambridge Guide to Global Medieval Travel Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2025) and A Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2019, with Candace Barrington). His essays have appeared in journals such as Speculum, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, The Review of English Studies, ELH, and The Chaucer Review. Sobecki is principal investigator of the SSHRC Insight Grant project Communities of Practice: Scripts, Scribes, and the Production of Literature in London, 1377–1471, and holds a joint grant with Université Paris Cité for a database on female travellers in medieval and early modern Eurasia.

His work has received coverage in major media outlets including the BBC, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Guardian, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. He is preparing The Cambridge History of the Literature of London: Vol. 1, The Beginnings to 1666 (with Stephanie Elsky) and The Oxford Handbook of Middle English Prose (with Emily Steiner), and is co-writing a book on Christine de Pizan.