I'm Professor of Later Medieval English Literature at the University of Toronto. I have written widely on travel and geographical literature in the Middle Ages, and my books include Medieval English Travel: A Critical Anthology, ed. with Anthony Bale (Oxford UP, 2019); 'Our Seas of Islands: New Approaches to British Insularity in the Late Middle Ages', a special issue of Postmedieval [7:4 (2016)], ed. with Matthew Boyd Goldie (reprinted as a monograph in 2023); The Sea and Medieval English Literature (D.S. Brewer, 2008); and, as editor, The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages (D.S. Brewer, 2011).
At present, I'm completing the monograph The Invention of Colonialism: Richard Hakluyt and Medieval Travel Writing (Cambridge UP) and the first two volumes of the Oxford edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (forthcoming), the main work written to justify the English colonisation of Virginia. My volumes will include 70 of the medieval narratives and documents printed by Hakluyt, among them the voyages to Mongolia of William of Rubruck and John of Plano Carpini. I am also writing The Marvels of Sir John Mandeville (Reaktion Books).