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.

Current Executive Board Members: Caterina Agostini, Luise Borek, Hannah Busch, Stewart J. Brookes, Matthew Evan Davis, Delphine Demelas, Suzette van Haaren, Tobias Hodel, Katarzyna Anna Kapitan, Laura Morreale, Dot Porter, Evina Stein, and N. Kıvılcım Yavuz.

Read more about Board Roles and Bios of the Executive Board Members below.  

Board Roles

Digital Medievalist has a working Board, meaning that members are expected to contribute actively to the day-to-day running of DM and its infrastructure. This is in part through active participation in regular (usually monthly) Board meetings, but also through a number of roles that require small but continual contributions throughout the year. The key posts are summarised below:

Director
Responsible for guiding overall direction and strategic vision, in close collaboration with the rest of the Board. In practice the Director does most of the administrative work such as arranging Board meetings, setting the agenda, keeping minutes, and so on.

Deputy Director
Assists the Director particularly in the more administrative roles but also should have some strategic vision. Deputises for the Director as necessary, e.g. arranging and running Board meetings if the Director is unavailable.

Journal Editor-In-Chief
Responsible for running the journal, including overall strategy, driving the acquisition of new articles, and ensuring that the journal runs smoothly. Normally assisted by at least two Associate Editors.

Journal Associate Editors
Responsible for helping the Editor-In-Chief, particularly by taking responsibility for particular articles, ensuring their timely review, assessing their suitability for publication and other editorial decisions.

Events Committee 
The primary role of the events committee is to identify conference opportunities that promote the activity and work of the Digital Medievalist community. The events committee encompasses two areas of action: first, to create at least one DM-sponsored online event per year, and second, to ensure an active DM presence at appropriate conferences, by organizing sessions, panels, or other interventions. The committee will meet twice a year to develop the annual conference strategy and assign roles for events committee members, who will act as points of contact for each effort. The committee will seek opportunities that will encourage the involvement of the global DM community.

DM-L Administrators
As for News Feed. The list is unmoderated, but new members need to be approved, and occasionally e-mails must be approved if they have certain spam-like characteristics.

Social Media Committee
Responsible for promoting DM and digital medieval studies across different platforms, approving new member requests and ensuring contributions are reasonable where necessary.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee
Responsible for promoting inclusivity and equity within the community, ensuring diverse representation in statements, projects, events, and the executive board.

Website Administrators
Responsible for ensuring the smooth operation of the website, including keeping static information up-to-date.

Postgraduate Committee Liaison
Responsible for guiding the sub-committee long-term plans and activities and in keeping a direct communication channel between the two boards.

Election Committee
Responsible for Board elections as well as other events that requires voting by DM members. See Election Procedures for more details.

The current holders of these posts are as follows:

Role	Current Holder(s) (2025-2026)
Director	N. Kıvılcım Yavuz
Deputy Director	Katarzyna Anna Kapitan
Journal Editor-in-Chief	Tobias Hodel
Journal Associate Editors	Caterina Agostini, Luise Borek, Stewart Brookes, Hannah Busch, Matthew Evan Davis, Delphine Demelas, Suzette van Haaren, Katarzyna Anna Kapitan, Laura Morreale, Dot Porter, Evina Stein, N. Kıvılcım Yavuz, Mike Kestemont, Gustavo Riva, James B. Harr, III
Events Committee	Caterina Agostini, Laura Morreale, Stewart J. Brookes, Katarzyna Anna Kapitan
Social Media Committee	Delphine Demelas, Luise Borek, Stewart J. Brookes, Suzette van Haaren, Dot Porter
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee	Suzette van Haaren, Delphine Demelas, Hannah Busch
DM-L Administrators	Caterina Agostini, N. Kıvılcım Yavuz, Tobias Hodel, Matthew Evan Davis
Website Administrators	Matthew Evan Davis, Hannah Busch, Evina Stein
Postgraduate Committee Liaison	Luise Borek, Suzette van Haaren
Election Committee	Luise Borek, N. Kıvılcım Yavuz

 

Bios of the Executive Board Members 

Caterina Agostini (2025-2029) is a historian of science and digital humanist at Indiana University Bloomington whose research explores the textual cultures of early modern Europe through digital methodologies. Her work centers on scientific manuscripts and the development of scholarly digital editions that integrate close textual analysis, TEI-based encoding, and computational approaches. She is Co-Principal Investigator of The Chymistry of Isaac Newton and the Thomas Harriot Papers, two digital editions that bring early modern scientific texts into dialogue with contemporary digital philology and manuscript studies. She has recently co-edited an edition of Goro Dati’s La Sfera (The Globe), a fifteenth-century cosmographic poem (Italica Press, 2025). As Ambassador of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), she advocates for open, scalable standards for digital imaging and annotation that facilitate manuscript research and global cultural heritage initiatives. Her expertise spans paleographic and codicological analysis, project management, grant writing, and the design of outreach strategies aimed at broadening access to digital scholarship and cultural heritage.

Luise Borek (2020-2026) is a medievalist and digital philologist currently on leave from her position at TU Darmstadt, Germany, where she has been active in research and teaching in the fields of German Medieval Studies and Digital Humanities. She now serves as a Digital Humanities Officer for the Union of German Academies of Sciences and Humanities, based in Mainz.

In her dissertation Arthurian Horses as Carriers of Meaning, she explored the symbolic roles of horses in Arthurian literature, combining medievalist research with Linked Open Data methodologies. Building on this work, she led the DFG-funded network “Linked Open Middle Ages”, which brought together scholars from different disciplines to explore and advance the use of Linked Open Data in medieval studies.

She has also been active for several years as part of DARIAH-DE (a component 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 co-developed a taxonomy widely used for the description and indexing of DH resources, which has been implemented as SKOS and is now fully integrated into the DARIAH-EU Vocabs Service.

Her research interests span Arthurian Romance, Literary Animal Studies, Digital Editions, Lexicography, Manuscript Studies, Digital Curation, Historical Linguistics, and the Digital Humanities more broadly. She is particularly committed to developing sustainable, forward-looking strategies for Digital Humanities, combining traditional scholarship with computational methods to foster the preservation and accessibility of digital cultural heritage. She actively supports open science as a means of connecting not only data, but also the researchers and communities behind it.

Stewart J. Brookes (2022-2026) (Medieval Studies PhD, King’s College London, 2007) is Tolkien Trust Project Cataloguer of medieval manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, 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 co-Director, with Joanna Tucker (Glasgow), of Models of Authority and they have exciting plans to extend the project. 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 on A Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Early English (Oxford University Press), a major revision and update of N.R. Ker’s highly-influential volume of similar title.

Hannah Busch (2025-2029) is a digital humanist based at the Cologne Center for eHumanities at the University of Cologne in Germany. There, she is a research associate within the project “Forming Europe by Overcoming the Schism of the 12th Century“ (funded by the Union of German Academies of Sciences and Humanities from 2023-2040). Hannah has been working in the field of Digital Medieval Studies since 2013. First as a research associate at the Trier Center for Digital Humanities (University of Trier, Germany) within the project eCodicology. In 2018, Hannah moved to the Netherlands where she was a PhD candidate at the Huygens Instituut (KNAW) in Amsterdam and at Leiden University researching the possibilities to apply deep machine learning for the study of mediaeval Latin palaeography. Her research interests lie in the application of computational methods in manuscript studies, but also more generally in various areas of digital mediaeval studies, in particular the (mass) digitization of medieval written documents and experimentation with computer-aided methods.

In addition, Hannah was a founding member of the Digital Medievalist Postgraduate Committee from 2019 – 2024 and co-editor of the podcast Coding Codices. She is member of the scientific committees of the German manuscript platform Handschriftenportal and the German national research data infrastructure (NFDI) Text+ task area editions.

Matthew Evan Davis (2023-2027) (Ph.D., Texas A&M University, 2013) is an Independent Scholar. Prior to this he served as a lecturer as well as in a number of postdoctoral positions, including as a ZKS-Lendrum Postdoctoral Fellow in the Scientific Study of Manuscripts and Inscriptions at Durham University, a Ruth and Lewis Sherman Center for Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow at McMaster University, a Lindsey Young Visiting Faculty Fellow at the University of Tennessee’s Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and as the Council of Library and Information Resources/Mellon Fellow in Data Curation for Medieval Studies at North Carolina State University. Additionally, he has served as a consultant on several digital projects in the GLAM sphere and is the editor of two volumes dealing with the use of digital tools and methods for the study of medieval and early modern culture: Meeting the Medieval in a Digital World (with Ece Turantor and Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel) and New Technologies and Renaissance Studies III(with Colin Wilder).

Delphine Demelas (2023-2027) is currently an Editor for the Anglo-Norman Dictionary project at Aberystwyth University, a vital digital resource for studying medieval Francophonie and the evolution of English. In this role since 2020, she actively contributes to the dictionary’s digital transformation, specializing in digital lexicography, XML encoding, and computational analysis of medieval French texts. Her doctoral research at Aix-Marseille University focused on creating a LaTeX critical edition of the 15th-century French epic La Chanson de Bertrand du Guesclin. She values interdisciplinary collaboration and its significance for the field. Previously, she taught medieval literature and digital humanities internationally, sharing her passion with diverse students. In Paraguay, she led an international project to digitize, preserve and describe the 19th C. manuscript El Libro de Oro, a Paraguayan national treasure. Her academic journey reflects a commitment to advancing medieval French studies, digital lexicography, and digital humanities through research, teaching, and international engagement.

Suzette van Haaren (2023-2027) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, affiliated with the collaborative research centre Virtuelle Lebenswelten (Virtual Worlds). Sub project B02 Virtuelles Mittelalter (Virtual Middle Ages) is dedicated to exploring the digitisation and digital uses of medieval objects in medievalist research. The primary focus of Suzette’s postdoctoral work is to investigate how the increasing integration of digital and virtual realms is reshaping the landscape of research practices. It aims to understand how digital research methods are evolving and the implications this has on our perceptions on and knowledge of the Middle Ages. Suzette finished her PhD at the University of St Andrews and the University of Groningen in May 2022, where she looked at the digitisation of medieval manuscripts from a theoretical materialist perspective. The thesis positions the digital medieval manuscript as important cultural and scientific object and explores ‘digital codicology’ as a method for studying the digital object. Find her on Bluesky (@suzettevhaaren.bsky.social).

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 thedigital 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, focusing on text recognition and natural language processing (like named entity recognition and information extraction in general).

Katarzyna Anna Kapitan (2025-2029) (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://zenodo.org/records/7968557>, 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 the French 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 served as the Chair of the Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Committee for the Medieval Academy of America (AY 2020-2021), where she also is a member of the CARA Executive Committee and one of the organization’s Councillors.

Dot Porter (2025-2029) is the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies Curator of Digital Humanities. In this position she participates in a wide-ranging digital humanities research and development team within the context of a special collections department. Dot’s projects focus on the digitization and visualization of medieval manuscripts.

Dot holds Master’s degrees in Medieval Studies and Library Science and started her career working on image-based digital editions of medieval manuscripts. She has worked on a variety of digital humanities projects over a decade-long career, focusing on materials as diverse as ancient texts and Russian religious folklore, providing both technical support and scholarly expertise. From 2010 until March 2013, she was the Associate Director for Digital Library Content and Services at the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries, where she led in planning and implementing new services to support librarians and faculty in the creation of digital projects. She has also worked for the Digital Humanities Observatory at the Royal Irish Academy, and the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities at the University of Kentucky.

Evina Stein (2025-2029) is a manuscript scholar and medieval Latinist specialising in early medieval Latin manuscripts with interests in network analysis, digital palaeography and codicology, manuscript databases, and global manuscript studies. She is currently an independent researcher based in Beirut, Lebanon. She has previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project SCRIBEMUS at the University of Pavia, acted as a scientific lead in a project developing a machine-learning model for automatic detection and classification of assembly cues in medieval manuscripts, and led a project about the diffusion and appropriation of the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville in the early Middle Ages, which included a database of the manuscripts of the Etymologies, a digital edition of glosses to this work, and the publication of a special issue of the Journal of Historical Network Research on network analysis for manuscript studies. She also taught an introductory course on DH for historians at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. As a member of the Databases of Early Latin Manuscripts (DELM) network, she currently coordinates a workgroup for data sustainability in manuscript database development.

N. Kıvılcım Yavuz (2021-2027) 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 expertise in two areas: (1) European manuscript culture, specifically the role of manuscripts as material artefacts in textual transmission and book history, and (2) medieval historiography, specifically origin stories of medieval peoples and nations. Her work in the field of digital Medieval Studies has been mostly focused on Manuscript Studies. In this regard, she is especially interested in the creation, collection and interpretation of data and metadata, particularly in the context of digitization of manuscripts and design 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.