Siân Echard
Professor, Department of English, University of British Columbia
Siân Echard attended Queen’s University at Kingston, graduating in 1984. She then completed her MA and PhD at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and in 1990 took up a position in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia, where she is now Professor of English.
Her research interests include Anglo Latin literature (especially Geoffrey of Monmouth), Arthurian literature, John Gower, and manuscript studies and book history. She is particularly interested in how the presentation of text—on the page, in the archive, in the digital world—affects how text is received and discussed.
She is editor of A Companion to Gower (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004). Her Arthurian work includes the books Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998) and The Arthur of Medieval Latin Literature (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011). Her publications in book history include Printing the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) and The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019). With Robert Rouse, she is the general editor of The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017).
She offers undergraduate and graduate courses in Middle English literature, the Arthurian tradition, medievalism, and book history.
She holds a UBC Killam Research Prize for 1998, a UBC Killam Teaching Prize for 2001, and was named a Distinguished University Scholar in 2004. She is currently a member of the governing council of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
