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: Luise Borek, Stewart J. Brookes, Matthew Evan Davis, Delphine Demelas, Suzette van Haaren, Tobias Hodel, Katarzyna Anna Kapitan, Laura Morreale, 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.

Conference Committee 
The primary role of the conference committee is to identify conference opportunities that promote the activity and work of the Digital Medievalist community. The conference 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 conference 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 Subcommittee
Responsible for promoting DM and digital medieval studies across different platforms, approving new member requests and ensuring contributions are reasonable where necessary.

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) (2023-2024)
Director	N. Kıvılcım Yavuz
Deputy Director	Katarzyna Anna Kapitan
Journal Editor-in-Chief	Laura Morreale
Journal Associate Editors	Stewart Brookes, Lisa Fagin Davis (not part of the DM Board), James Harr (not part of the DM Board), Katarzyna Anna Kapitan, Mike Kestemont (not part of the DM Board), Gustavo Riva (not part of the DM Board), Daniel O’Donnell (not part of the DM Board), Peter Robinson (not part of the DM Board), N. Kıvılcım Yavuz
Conference Committee	Stewart J. Brookes, Laura Morreale, N. Kıvılcım Yavuz
Social Media Subcommittee	Luise Borek, Delphine Demelas, Suzette van Haaren, Tobias Hodel, Laura Morreale
DM-L Administrators	N. Kıvılcım Yavuz, Tobias Hodel, Matthew Evan Davis
Website Administrators	Stewart J. Brookes, Tobias Hodel, Katarzyna Anna Kapitan
Postgraduate Committee Liaison	Luise Borek
Election Committee	To be determined (for 2025)

Bios of the Executive Board Members 

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 Tolkien Trust Project Cataloguer 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 currently 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 with Elaine Treharne on a Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Early English, a major revision and update of N.R. Ker’s highly-influential volume of similar title.

Matthew Evan Davis (Ph.D., Texas A&M University, 2013) is a Lecturer and Co-Coordinator of the Graduate Theme in Digital Arts and Humanities at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus. Prior to this he served 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 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. In recognition of her work, Suzette was awarded the Victorine van Schaick-penning by the KNVI (Royal Dutch Association for Information Professionals) in November 2022, honoring the best written work in the field of library- and information science. With a strong focus on the materiality of (digital) heritage, Suzette’s work strives to transcend the traditional boundaries between academic disciplines. She holds a master’s degree in Medieval Studies and a bachelor’s degree in Art History, both earned from Utrecht University. Find her on Mastodon (@suzettevhaaren@akademienl.social) or on X (@suzettevhaaren).

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 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.

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.