There are certain course policies that are identical across all the courses I teach. I provide links to the course policy pages through each individual course website, but I’ll also aggregate them here for easy reference:

Real-Time Comprehension Questions

Deadlines and Lateness

Engagement, Participation, Attendance

Remote Alternatives for Attendance

Alternative Avenues for Participation

Accommodations and Modifications

Instructions for Late Registrants/Waitlisters

Minimum Technical Requirements for Remote/Online Learning

Official University of Toronto Grading Scale (at Item 7)

My undergraduate Office Hours for fall term 2025 are now closed.

For spring term 2026, starting on Wed 7 Jan, my undergraduate Office Hours will be by appointment only during the times below:

• MONDAYS, 2:15pm to 2:55pm

• WEDNESDAYS, 4:10pm (and continuing until 5:00pm or 5:30pm, depending on the week, with later hours in higher-demand weeks)

I hold all my Office Hours meetings at the Hart House Arbor Room, 7 Hart House Circle. It is an open, public, community-oriented space (often with music playing) — because Office Hours, like any conversation with me in my role as course instructor, are public, open, and community-oriented. I only offer Office Hours in person, not online.

There are no Office Hours on campus holidays; there are no Office Hours in weeks when classes are not in session. I’m accommodating multiple students at (and just before) these meetings, so Office Hours often run behind schedule: come to your appointment on time to minimize those problems, but be prepared for the schedule to run up to 10 minutes late.

HOW TO MAKE AN APPOINTMENT (READ THIS CAREFULLY!): I can meet with any student who has made an appointment, for a maximum of 15 minutes at a time per student, but I offer appointments in 5-minute blocks. So, at this Google Calendar booking page (click here), each student can reserve up to three blocks (15 minutes). If you want a standard 15-minute session, be sure to reserve three blocks in a row. Or, if you only need to grab 5 minutes (say, to make up CQs), you can just reserve one block. You can reserve blocks at any time, even right before the meeting starts.Appointment slots are first-come, first-served. Please do not make appointments in two consecutive weeks.

Unless you are a currently enrolled graduate student or faculty member (at any college or university), I cannot meet with you outside of my scheduled undergraduate Office Hours (click here for an explanation of that policy). The booking page should prompt you to specify whether you'll attend in-person or online; if the latter, use the "Current Remote Meeting Link" below. I strongly encourage students to meet with me in pairs (in which case the three of us can meet for 30 minutes total) or in groups of three (in which case the four of us can meet for 45 minutes total!). Please be respectful and don't try to append "just one more quick question" when your time is up.

Some of my assignments in ENG 330 and ENG 331 require students to present their work at a one-on-one appointment with me in my office at JHB 812, 170 St George Street. I use a separate booking system for these appointments; I'll post the next booking link here when it becomes available.

The next round of one-on-one presentations will be in ENG 331, in 20-minute slots on February 11, 12, and 13, at varied times on each date. Appointment booking will be three weeks in advance (contact me if it is not working properly ); after that date, click here to book an appointment be sure to click “Jump to the next available date” when you get there).

If you are meeting with me on Zoom, for a class, for Office Hours, or otherwise — unless I’ve specified that we are meeting elsewhere — we are probably meeting in this virtual Zoom room (click here). The Meeting ID is 989 3537 2626 and the passcode is gx6FbN (but you probably won’t need those — just open Zoom on your own computer and click on the link).

If you don’t have Zoom — loathe as I am to be recruited into advertising here — you can download it for free at Zoom’s website (click here).

1. The best way to get in touch with me is to talk to me in person — by speaking up in class or meeting with me during Office Hours (see above)!

2. If that doesn’t work, check to see whether your course webpage provides an answer to your question (it likely does; see the links at the menu bar above) and check my FAQ (see below).

3. If that doesn’t work, then feel free to email me at my undergraduate contact address, sergi.utoronto@gmail.com — that email is reserved only for inquiries by my undergraduate students. I can usually only respond to emails with short (and sometimes terse) answers; bring up longer or more complicated questions during class or Office Hours.

IMPORTANT: If you are an undergraduate who wishes to contact me by email, be sure to only contact me at sergi.utoronto@gmail.com — my various email addresses have automatic email filing and prioritizing systems in place, so undergraduate inquires sent to the wrong address, or CCed to more than one email address of mine, will likely wind up heavily delayed or deleted entirely.

Response time for emails: During terms when I am teaching, I respond to emails usually within a week after they’re sent, regardless of the urgency of the inquiry (do not follow up before two weeks have passed; doing so messes with my email priority system and is more likely to cause delays than fix them). During terms when I am not teaching, responses may take up to a month (or, in some cases, the email account may be temporarily frozen, but you’ll get an autoresponse if that’s true).

If you are a graduate student, faculty member, or anyone else, please consult my official University of Toronto faculty page for contact info.

If you are a currently enrolled undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, please make sure to email me only at the undergrad email specified above; if you don’t, all emails you send may likely be misdirected, delayed, or deleted.

Most of the questions that undergraduates email to me can be answered pretty handily by one of my pre-written FAQ pages (click here). Please consult the list before you contact me — that way, I can focus my efforts on those student inquiries that require more immediate and particular attention.

Using an FAQ might seem a bit cold at first, I realize, but the reason I am usually able to respond to student emails with speed, warmth, and attention is because of the time the FAQ saves me!

Again, click here to access my FAQ page.

I’ve got specific and very thorough instructions for anyone who would like to request a reference or recommendation from me — click here to read them.

To access a list of video material I’ve made for my classes, click here.

To access a list of editions of class texts that I’ve made for my classes, click here.

If you are planning to use information from a dictionary in an essay you’re writing, consult my “On Dictionaries” guide first.

DOE: The University of Toronto’s Dictionary of Old English (DOE), which covers words in English before the year 1100, is behind a paywall. University of Toronto students’ tuition includes access: go to the U of T Library Homepage and type in these exact words: “Dictionary of Old English: A to Le Online”, following prompts from there to sign in. If you type in anything different, the library page may likely take you to the wrong resource.

MED: The University of Michigan’s Middle English Dictionary (MED), which covers words in English from the years 1000-1500, is available for free online: just click here to access it. (If you have trouble finding a headword, try replacing vowels with * or ? symbols; try leaving * at the end of the word you’re looking up, unless you’re looking up a verb, in which case you should use *n.)

OED: The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which specializes in words in English in use after 1500 (though its entries will track those words into their earliest history), is behind a paywall. University of Toronto students’ tuition includes access to the OED: go to the U of T Library Homepage and type in these exact words: “Oxford English Dictionary Online”, following prompts from there to sign in. If that does not work for you, please contact me immediately and let me know, so I can get out ahead of any further changes the providers make.

Some of the Records of Early English Drama are available only in hard-copy books; some are available only online. The successful researcher in early drama must consult both REED formats before moving forward with a research hypothesis.

To access the REED hard copies, the best place is in the REED offices themselves, in Suite 810 of the Jackman Humanities Building (JHB, at 170 St George St, 8th Floor, just beyond my office), because there is a whole library there dedicated only to early drama. Those offices may only be open at erratic times, though, based on when REED staff happen to be there. Especially if you’re commuting from far away, I recommend checking ahead of time with REED staff and with me, to make sure someone will be there to let you in ahead of time. I’ll share contact info in my classes as needed.

But you can also access the REED hard copies (though not necessarily all of them) at campus libraries, where they are non-circulating: Robarts (the main library), the Kelly Library (at St Mike’s), the U of T Mississauga Library, the Pratt Library (at Vic, usually housed within the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies), and PIMS (the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies). Those last two may be in areas that require an appointment ahead of time to access (but they’re quite interesting places and worth the trip). If you’re truly in a pinch, you can also find some limited REED hard copies in free (legal!) pdf format through the Internet Archive (click here), though these pdfs are huge and hard to explore unless you know what you’re looking for ahead of time.

To access the online REED archives, head to E-REED (click here). Note that the E-REED site is different from the older REED site (click here), which has some interesting resources of its own.

Housed at the University of Rochester, the Middle English Texts Series (METS) has produced excellent editions of many Middle English texts, including many of the ones I teach in my classes. All of the texts they publish are available for free online in excellent, student-oriented, thoroughly scholarly editions.

Well, they’re available for free for now. They run on grants and donations — and academic grants in the United States have been drying up; METS once relied heavily on NEH funding, for instance, which was rather abruptly discontinued across the board. Please consider, then, making a small donation to keep these texts available for future students’ and scholars’ use.

Early English Books Online (EEBO) will give you access to many of the earliest extant copies of English printed texts (not manuscripts), as far back as the earliest days of print in England. University of Toronto students’ tuition includes access to EEBO (which is otherwise behind a paywall): go to the U of T Library Homepage and type in these exact words: “EEBO Early English Books Online”. If you type in anything different, the library page may likely take you to the wrong resource.

Online access to early manuscripts will vary depending on the manuscript, but I often refer my students to the Macro Manuscript at the Folger Library, c. 1440-75, which contains the earliest extant copies of The Castle of Perseverance, Mankind, and Wisdom, and is available in an excellent online digitized copy (click here).

Students in my ENG 385 class frequently use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Two online resources are very valuable in that regard: Peter Isotalo’s Interactive IPA Chart (with audio examples; click here) and TypeIt’s Type IPA Phonetic Symbols site (click here).

We also make use of two linguistic atlases: EWAVE (The Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English) for global varieties in current use; ELALME (An Electronic Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English for varieties in use 1350-1500.

I offer these twelve pages (click here) to any undergraduate student writing an essay for a literature class (though I’m told graduate students and high school students have also found them helpful) — but especially to any undergraduate student writing an essay for one of my classes. If you ask me what I’m looking for, or what I would like to see, in an essay you’re writing for me, these twelve criteria are my answer.

In 2021, I challenged the students in my graduate seminar to take on a collaborative “public-facing document” assignment—in which the students in the seminar work together to create an encyclopedia-style online reference page, envisioned as a jumping-off point for any new learners who’d like to know more about whatever that seminar’s subject was. We then use the new reference resource as a template for submitting large-scale edits and updates to the Wikipedia page on that subject, in the interest of improving and correcting general public knowledge of the subject. I plan to use this assignment in some future graduate courses as well; I’ll aggregate here any new reference resources generated by my graduate seminar students—explore as you please!:

Morality Plays(generated by ENG 1007, “Medieval Drama: Morality Plays,” Winter 2021 / see also the Wikipedia entry on Morality Play)