Ph.D., University of Cambridge
M.Phil. (Medieval English, 650-1550), University of Oxford
B.A. (Hons.), University of Toronto

Devani Singh is a literary scholar and book historian who specialises in the literature of medieval and early modern England. She currently holds a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Research Fellowship at the University of Geneva, Switzerland and leads the ‘To the Reader’ project, which studies the emergence of printed letters to readers in English books. She previously held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in English at the University of Oxford.

Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Book History, Digital Philology, The Chaucer Review, The Journal of the Early Book Society, and Shakespeare. Her monograph, Chaucer’s Early Modern Readers: Reception in Print and Manuscript, which traces the afterlives of fifteenth-century Chaucer manuscripts and demonstrates the unlikely role of printed books in their survival, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. With Lukas Erne, she is co-author of Shakespeare in Geneva (2018) and co-editor of the first critical edition of the printed commonplace book Bel-vedére or the Garden of the Muses (2020). Additional research interests include medieval literature and its legacy, the study of prefatory rhetoric, author portraits in manuscript and print, women in the book trade, and marginalia of all kinds.

She has been the recipient of major fellowships from the Bibliographical Society, the Bodleian Centre for the Study of the Book, the Gates Cambridge Trust, the Jackman Humanities Institute, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

In 2022, she co-founded Print Exchanges, a collaborative network of early and mid-career print scholars, together with UK- and US-based colleagues, Alex da Costa, Aditi Nafde, and Kathleen Tonry.

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The banner image on this site is from the Bodmer copy of William Caxton’s second edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c.1483; STC 5083), sig. s.6v (detail), used here under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC, 4.0 licence.