Professor Sebastian Sobecki is among the recipients of the 2024 Dean’s Research Excellence Awards.
The award recognizes significant and sustained research achievement and impact by faculty members of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts & Science. Along with four other recipients, Sobecki is celebrated for his sustained influence in his discipline and will receive $10,000 to further his research and development.
Sobecki is a professor of later medieval English literature in the Department of English and the Centre for Medieval Studies. A Fellow of the English Association and the Royal Historical Society, Sobecki 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.
Throughout his career, Sobecki’s research has spanned a breadth of late medieval and early modern literature, focusing on ideas of the self, life writing, law, travel, and authorship in the literary history of the long fifteenth century. Manuscripts and palaeography are central to his practice.
“It’s been incredibly rewarding to work on exciting research initiatives such as using machine learning to identify the habits of scribes with my Toronto colleagues at Alexandra Gillespie’s Old Books New Science Lab,” says Sobecki.
“I’m delighted to receive this year’s Dean’s Research Excellence Award and grateful for the opportunity to work with such talented students and colleagues.”
Sobecki is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Middle English Prose and The Cambridge History of Literature of London: Vol. 1, From the Beginnings to 1660. He’s written a number of books and more than seventy essays, including Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press), and he’s produced The Cambridge Guide to Global Medieval Travel Writing (Cambridge University Press, in press).
“Professor Sobecki is a leader in his field and one of the reasons why the Department of English at the University of Toronto is recognized as among the best in the world,” says Professor Robert McGill, Acting Chair of English. “I’m thrilled that he has received this well-deserved honour.”