Michael Felix Suarez

Michael F. Suarez, S.J. is an American academic and Jesuit priest. He is the executive director of Rare Book School (RBS) at the University of Virginia (UVA), where he is also a professor of English, a university professor, and an honorary curator of special collections. In addition to serving as Rare Book School’s executive Director, Suarez teaches multiple courses on bibliography and book history at the school.

Education

Suarez has a B.A. from Bucknell University where he triple-majored in biology, English, and sociology and was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate. His has a Doctor of Philosophy, a Master of Studies, and an M.A./B.A. from Oxford University; he also earned Master of theology and Master of divinity from the Weston Jesuit School of Theology. He was a junior research fellow at St. John’s College, Oxford (1995–99). He has previously held research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Since 2010, he has served as the editor-in-chief of Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO), which contains the equivalent of over 870,000 print pages of digital content. He is also co-general editor of The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. and "a fount of knowledge where the Internet is but a slot machine." In 2021, he gave the A. S. W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography at the University of Pennsylvania. His series of three lectures was titled "Printing Abolition: How the Fight to Ban the British Slave Trade Was Won, 1783–1807" and highlighted the role of print publications of many kinds in creating public opinion against slavery in sugar plantations in the Caribbean.

In 2022, he was the inaugural guest professor of paleography at the University of Chicago. Suarez currently serves as the chair of the naming and memorials committee at the University of Virginia, which is dedicated to contextualizing and deliberating on statues and memorials on university grounds. Suarez delivered the UVA commencement address on May 17, 2025. Suarez, Michael F. and Michael L. Turner, eds. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. vol. 5, 1695–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. . Suarez, Michael Felix, H. R Woudhuysen, and Oxford University Press. The Book : A Global History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Suarez, Michael F. co-general editor. The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Dublin Notebook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Suarez, Michael F. "Hard Cases: Confronting Bibliographical Difficulty in Eighteenth-Century Texts." Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America vol. 111, no. 1 (2017): 1–30.