Sebastian Sobecki receives Visiting Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, and Neil Ker Memorial Fund for new project

Sebastian Sobecki, Professor of Medieval English Literature and Culture at the Faculty of Arts, has received a visiting fellowship from Magdalen College, Oxford, for this autumn, and a Neil Ker Memorial Fund grant from the British Academy. Both are linked to a new project on medieval manuscripts and civic clerks, called: “Inner Circles: Reading and Writing in Late Medieval London.”

About the project
The aim of the project is to produce a substantial monograph on scribal culture and book production in London from the late fourteenth to the late fifteenth century. The book is provisionally entitled 'Reading and Writing in Late Medieval London' and will offer the first comprehensive discussion of all institutional and private contexts in which writing and reading took place in the London area (London, Westminster, Southwark, and their environs). This will include the courts, writing offices, and institutions of the national government in Westminster; civic offices, commercial, and guild contexts in London; and religious courts and houses in and around London.

The British Academy's Neil Ker Memorial Fund will support the digitisation costs for this project, and some of the research will be conducted during a three-month Visiting Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford.

About Sobecki
Sebastian Sobecki specialises in English literature and literary history from Chaucer to the Reformation, especially archives and manuscripts; ideas of authorship and literary culture; law and literature; political writing and intellectual history; and travel and global medieval literature. He was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College at the University of Oxford, H.P. Kraus Fellow in Early Books and Manuscripts at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. In 2016, he was awarded the John Hurt Fisher Prize by the John Gower Society. He has received grants from the British Academy's Neil Ker Memorial Fund, Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), Québec's FQRSC, the German Research Foundation (DFG), and SAUTE in Switzerland.

On Thursday 18 March Sobecki will give the 2021 Chaucer Lecture on his project at the University of Kent. The lecture is free and will be recorded. More information can be found on this page.