Executive Board

Detail from Book of Hours by Master of Guillebert de Mets, Belgium ca. 1450. Wikimedia Commons.

Digital Medievalist is overseen by an eight-member Executive Board of medievalists with considerable experience in the use of digital media in the study of medieval topics. Each year, four members of the Board are elected for a term of two years. Nominations and elections are normally held in late spring or early summer. All members of the Digital Medievalist community are encouraged to nominate candidates (including themselves) for the Board and to vote in the annual elections. See the Bylaws for more information.

TERM ENDING IN 2023

Lisa Fagin Davis (2017-2023) (Medieval Studies PhD, Yale University, 1993) has been Executive Director of the Medieval Academy of America since 2013. Previously, she spent twenty years cataloguing pre-1600 manuscript collections across the US and has been involved in the development of metadata standards for manuscript cataloguing. She serves on the Advisory Committees for Digital Scriptorium, the Schoenberg Institute of Manuscript Studies, and Fragmentarium, and is deeply engaged in using and promoting both Mirador and IIIF. Publications include: the Beinecke Library Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, Vol. IV; The Gottschalk Antiphonary; the Directory of Pre-1600 Manuscripts in the United States and Canada (with Melissa Conway); numerous articles in the fields of manuscript studies and codicology; La Chronique Anonyme Universelle: Reading and Writing History in fifteenth-century France (a critical edition that includes a digital resource developed in collaboration with the Digital Mappaemundi project); and the Manuscript Road Trip blog. She regularly teaches an introduction to manuscript studies at the Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science.

Rose Faunce (2019-2023)  (PhD University of Melbourne, 2017) is based at the Australian National University, School of Culture, History and Language, and manages the College of Asia and the Pacific collection of art and cultural heritage material. She has a background in the study of the history of the illustrated book, working for several years in the rare book and antiquarian print trade. An encounter with the 14th century fragmentary Cocharelli Codex, dispersed in collections in London, Florence and Cleveland, led to a PhD under the supervision of Emeritus Professor Margaret Manion, to reconstruct transcribe and translate its text, and analyse the rich profusion of illustration gracing every page. She is currently working on a project to identify manuscript fragments in Australian and New Zealand collections and make them more easily discoverable on-line.

Gustavo Fernández Riva (2021-2023) is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Heidelberg (Germany). As a member of the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Material Text Cultures’, he develops tools for editing and researching pre-modern written artefacts, specifically relic labels, ancient letters, epigraphic inscriptions, and illuminated manuscripts. Since March 2021, he also lectures in the Digital Humanities degree at the UCES (Argentina), where he teaches a module on data analysis and visualization. He studied medieval literature at the universities of Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Porto (Portugal). His Ph.D. dissertation (University of Buenos Aires, 2018) included a critical edition in TEI and Spanish translation of texts by the Middle High German poet Konrad von Würzburg. He has also co-edited Der arme Heinrich – digital. His current research projects include using network analysis to study shared manuscript transmission of medieval texts and the creation of an open, collaborative dataset of philological stemmata.

N. Kıvılcım Yavuz (2021-2023) is Lecturer in Medieval Studies and Digital Humanities at the University of Leeds. She works at the intersection of medieval studies and digital humanities with expertises in medieval historiography, specifically origin stories of medieval peoples and nations, and European manuscript culture, specifically the role of manuscripts as material artefacts in textual transmission and book history. She is especially interested in digitization of manuscripts as cultural heritage items and creation, collection and interpretation of data and metadata in the context of digital repositories. She has taught courses on the history of the late antique, medieval and Renaissance Europe, medieval European literature, manuscript studies and digital humanities in Leeds (UK), Copenhagen (Denmark), Reykjavík (Iceland), Leipzig (Germany) and Lawrence, KS (USA). In August 2022, she was elected Director of the Executive Board of Digital Medievalist. She posts about manuscripts on Twitter and Instagram with the handle @manuscriptsetc.

TERM ENDING IN 2026

Luise Borek (2020-2026) is medievalist and digital philologist at TU Darmstadt, Germany. In her dissertation on Arthurian Horses (to be published as a supplement of the Zeitschrift für Deutsches Altertum, ZfdA) she combined medievalist content with Linked Open Data procedures. Former research projects include an interdisciplinary collaboration on the Interaction between linguistic and bioinformatics procedures, methods and algorithms based at the Trier Center for Digital Humanities and several years of experience as a member of DARIAH-DE (part of the ESFRI-Project DARIAH-EU) where she coordinated a cluster on Digital Annotation. As a founding member of TaDiRAH (Taxonomy of Digital Research Activities in the Humanities), she has co-developed a taxonomy for the description and indexing of DH resources, which is widely used in the community and is currently being transferred as LOD to the Vocabs Service of DARIAH-EU. Her fields of research include Arthurian Romance, Literary Animal Studies, Digital Editions, Lexicography, Manuscript Studies, Digital Curation, Historical Linguistics as well as Digital Humanities in general. She supports open science to help shape a sustainable foundation for the future, which not only connects the data, but also the researchers involved.

Stewart J. Brookes (2022-2026) (Medieval Studies PhD, King’s College London, 2007) is the Lyell Fellow in Latin Palaeography at the Bodleian Library and a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. He is a co-designer of Archetype (archetype.ink), an integrated suite of open-source, web-based tools for the study of medieval handwriting, art and iconography. Archetype has been used in more than 30 DH projects, ranging from AHRC and ERC funded research to student projects for MA and PhD dissertations, and it won the Medieval Academy of America’s first annual Digital Humanities prize (2017). Stewart was a postdoctoral Research Associate on two major Digital Humanities projects at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College, London: DigiPal (digipal.eu; 2011-2014) and Models of Authority (www.modelsofauthority.ac.uk; 2014-2017). He is currently co-Director, with Joanna Tucker (Glasgow), of Models of Authority and they have exciting plans to extend the project in the coming year. Stewart’s publications include chapters on Digital Humanities approaches to studying palaeography; liturgy and Ælfric; and handwriting variation in Aldred’s gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels. He is currently working with Elaine Treharne on a Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Old English, a major revision and update of N.R. Ker’s highly-influential volume of similar title. This will appear both as a printed volume and as a fully-searchable online database.

Tobias Hodel (2020-2026) is assistant professor in digital humanities at the University of Berne. He is a medievalist by training and received a Ph.D. from the University of Zurich [Schriftordnungen im Wandel, Konstanz 2020], where he was responsible for the digital edition of Königsfelden abbey as well as the e-learning environment “Ad fontes”, introducing students to paleography and further auxiliary sciences. He works on the application and critical integration of machine learning processes for pre-modern documents, with a focus on text recognition and natural language processing (like named entity recognition and information extraction).

Katarzyna Anna Kapitan (2022-2026) (PhD in Nordic Philology, University of Copenhagen, 2018) is a manuscript scholar and digital humanist specialising in Old Norse-Icelandic literature and culture. Currently she is Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College, University of Oxford, where she works on her most recent project “Virtual Library of Torfæus”, a digital book-historical project funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. Previously, she has worked on a wide array of digital projects and has experience in producing digital data sets for historical research (XML-based scholarly editions < https://clarino.uib.no/menota/catalogue> & catalogues of manuscripts <https://handrit.is >), applying digital tools and methods to manuscript studies (data visualisation, computer-assisted stemmatics, network analysis, etc.), and disseminating research results in the digital domain (digital exhibitions with Omeka < https://oldnorsereception.omeka.net>, blogposts, etc.). Focusing on Old-Norse Icelandic manuscripts, book history, and textual criticism, she published on applications of DH to manuscript studies and taught DH courses in fundamentals of TEI-XML, digital scholarly editing and cataloguing as well as computer assisted textual criticism at the European Summer University in Digital Humanities, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, and the Summer School in Scandinavian Manuscript Studies.

Laura Morreale (2020-2026) has a Ph.D. from Fordham University (2004) and is an Independent Scholar and Cultural Historian of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian peninsula, with particular interest in medieval French-language writings outside of the kingdom of France. She is the creator of the French of Italy and French of Outremer websites and a Lead Scholar on their associated web-based studies, including the Oxford Outremer Map, Exploring Place in theFrench of Italy, and the French of Outremer Legal Texts Translation Project. Laura is a co-editor of Middle Ages for Educators, an online resource for medievalists as they integrate digital approaches into their pedagogical practice. She is also the Project Lead on the Digital Documentation Process, a standardized citation and cataloguing system for born-digital projects, and Co-PI of the Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe (DALME) project based at Harvard University. Recent digital initiatives include the La Sfera International Challenge and the Deiphira Translation Project. Laura is currently the Chair of the Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Committee for the Medieval Academy of America (AY 2020-2021), where she also serves as a member of the CARA Executive Committee and one of the organization’s Councillors.