The Postgraduate Committee was created to coordinate the organization of joint panels, production of podcasts, general social media presence, and promote peer-to-peer exchange. The goal is to increase the visibility of these infrastructures while initiating conversations on interdisciplinary work, necessary skills, and acknowledging the need to reform university curricula in the medieval context and thus contribute to an overarching perspective towards current debates on the profiling of disciplines in the humanities between traditional and innovative/alternative requirements.
Current Members
Hannah Busch is a Ph.D. candidate in the project Digital Forensics for Historical Documents at the Huygens Institute in Amsterdam and Leiden University. In her thesis, she focuses on the application of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for the study of medieval Latin paleography. Hannah studied German-Italian studies (B.A./Laurea Triennale) at the Universities of Bonn and Florence, followed by the completion of a M.A. in Textual Scholarship at the Free University of Berlin. Since June 2023 Hannah is a researcher at the Cologne Center for eHumanities at the University of Cologne, Germany. Before starting her PhD adventures in the Netherlands in 2018 Hannah worked in different positions at the Trier Center for Digital Humanities, Germany. Her research interests include large scale digitization of medieval manuscripts, and experimenting with the application of computational methods that can support and enhance the work of manuscripts scholars. She is member of the DFG Network “Open Middle Ages” and part of the editorial team of the German science blog Mittelalter – Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte, and tweets as @cesare_blanc. (2019–)
Sebastian Dows-Miller is a doctoral student in Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, where he previously completed his BA and MSt. His research interests centre around the manuscript transmission of short texts, with a particular interest in those written in Old French. His doctoral thesis focusses on a fourteenth-century manuscript collection (BnF fr. 24432), taking a mixed-method approach to questions both of transmission, and also the thematic interactions between texts contained in the same manuscript, which involves the use of data-driven and statistical approaches. He enjoys teaching at undergraduate level, holding lectureships at both Hertford and Merton colleges, and occasionally tweets at @dowsmillerseb. (2022–)
Ségolène Gence is a doctoral researcher funded by CHASE AHRC at the University of Kent’s Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She completed her MA in Medieval and Early Modern Studies in 2015 at the University of Kent and did her undergraduate degree both at the Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France, and at the University of Kent. Ségolène’s research interests reside at the intersections of material contexts of pre-modern religious literature, textual networks, early print culture, manuscript studies, comparative literature, and digital humanities. Ségolène’s current research focuses on English devotional literature from the fourteenth and fifteenth century, textual transmission, and manuscript studies using social network analysis, looking at the dynamic relationships between author, text, and audience. She also dabbles in Anglo-Norman and medieval French literature on the side. Ségolène is currently the Social Media Manager for MEMS (the Centre of Medieval and Early Modern studies at the University of Kent) and sits on the committee board of the interdisciplinary Enclosure group. Ségolène is also an avid twitter and can be found under @SegoAG. (2023–)
Estelle Guéville (https://estellegvl.github.io) is a French curator and researcher currently pursuing her PhD in Medieval Studies at Yale. She holds B.A.s in History and Art History and M.A.s in History and the Management of Cultural Heritage from Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne. Before joining Yale, she worked for several cultural institutions in France and the Gulf, including the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Musée national du Moyen Age – Thermes de Cluny in Paris. At Yale, she co-created the Graduate Digital Humanities Colloquium, a working group bringing together graduate students across disciplines to explore how digital tools can offer new possibilities in humanistic inquiry. Her research interests include the qualitative and quantitative study of manuscripts, as well as questions of authorship, attribution and copy. She is the co-creator of the Paris Bible Project, a digital humanities initiative studying abbreviations and special letter forms as markers of scribal practices. Other projects include work on illuminations (“Understanding Medieval Manuscripts Gilding Techniques” and “Deep Illumination”) and several Public Humanities initiatives. In her dissertation, she aims to recover the history of medieval female scribes, using both traditional and digital methods of history and art history. (2023–)
Catrin Haberfield is a PhD student in English at Stanford University. They hold a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford and an MA in Medieval and Early Modern Studies from the University of Manchester. Catrin now specialises in early medieval material and textual culture across the Insular world – in particular, using UX theory to identify the user journeys of textual objects and re-examine approaches to digitisation. They are a co-organiser of the Medieval Misuse reading group, a member of Stanford Manuscript Sciences, and a co-editor of the Old English Poetry in Facsimile project. They can be found on Twitter @CatrinH42. (2023–)
Julia Pelosi-Thorpe (jpelosithorpe.com) studied Classics at the Universities of Melbourne and Bologna and is now completing a PhD in Italian Studies/Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in histories of textual technologies, transmissions, and receptions, and works with English, Latin, Italian, Dialects, and HTML to adapt and translate texts. Her MA by research (2020) examined, through close readings of rare books held in Italian libraries, early modern vernacular receptions of Ovid that creatively remixed his erotic writings. Julia co-runs the Penn Paleography Group with Anne (Lantian) Jing and is a 2023–2024 Graduate Student Research Fellow with the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. Her project Making (and Remaking) Texts Past, Present, and Future uses the experience of collaboratively cataloguing and digitising a 15th-century Italian book of hours to grapple with how manuscripts’ layers of material manipulation across the centuries shape how they have been understood, described, and associated with other texts. (2023–)
Philipp Schneider (https://hu.berlin/philipp-schneider-en) is a research assistant and PhD student in Digital History, working at Humboldt University of Berlin. He holds a M.A. in history and a B.A. in history and computer science. His main research interests lie in the application of computational methods – especially from the area of Semantic Web Technologies – to the study of visual sources in historical resaerch. This encompasses information modelling with ontology engineering as well as exploring data-driven methods to utilise Semantic Web data and hybrid AI to answer historical research questions. In his PhD, “Coats of Arms in Context”, he focuses on visual communication with heraldic programs on painted walls and ceilings in France and the Holy Roman Empire between the 14th and 17th century. This work is part of the project Digital Heraldry, which examines the developement of the practices of using heraldry throughout the Middle Ages. Here, Philipp develops a Knowledge Graph to describe coats of arms, their material context, and their context of use. Philipp is also involved in teaching Master students who specialise in Digital History. Quite infrequently, he tweets and toots. (2023–)
Former Members
Nathan Daniels. Ph.D. candidate in History, Johns Hopkins University. (2019–22)
James B. Harr, III. Ph.D. in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media, North Carolina State University. (2019–23)
Tessa Gengnagel. Ph.D. in Information Processing (Digital Humanities), University of Cologne. (2019–23)
Aylin Malcolm. Ph.D. in English, University of Pennsylvania. (2019–23)
Caitlin Postal. Ph.D. in English, University of Washington. (2019–23)
Daniela Schulz. Researcher at the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. (2019–23)
Digital Medievalist 