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

Giulia D’Agostino is a doctoral candidate in Germanic Philology and Digital Humanities at the University of Verona, Italy. Her PhD project consists of a synoptic digital edition of the three versions of the Alexanderlied, based on a TEI encoding of textual units. She is also a research associate in Computer Philology and Medieval Studies at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. She holds a MA in Linguistics from the University of Pavia, Italy, and a Postgraduate Certificate in Digital Humanities from University College London. She enjoys working on text and image annotation, historical linguistics and manuscript studies. (2025–)

Barbara Denicolò is a historian and philologist specializing in medieval and early modern history, and food studies. She studied History, German Studies, and Latin at the University of Innsbruck and further pursued postgraduate training in Archival Studies, Paleography, and Diplomatics at the Italian State Archives in Bolzano. Additionally, she holds a Master’s degree in Gastrosophical Sciences from the University of Salzburg. Her dissertation focused on manuscript German recipe collections from the 14th to the 17thcentury, analyzing them as sources for cultural and knowledge history through discourse analysis and making a digital edition and semantic annotation. Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Salzburg. Her project SiCPAS – Sigmund of Tyrol’s Court. Practices – Actors – Spaces examines the court of Sigmund of Habsburg-Tyrol from an actor-centered perspective, integrating computational approaches such as and Named Entity Recognition and Event Annotation analyze inventories and account books. (2025–)

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–)

Sebastian Gensicke (Homepage) studied History and at the University of Leipzig. He is preparing a doctoral thesis at the University of Bochum on the episcopal charters of the church province of Reims in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. His project combines diplomatic and digital methods, focusing on the graphic conception of the charters on the one hand, and their textual and formulaic development on the other. A fully digital research process including XML markup, natural language processing with Python and network visualisations is used to map a “diplomatic landscape” and to discover the mechanisms of its evolution. In addition, Sebastian was and is involved in projects that aim at bringing the “Regest” into the digital age: First (2021-2023) as a research assistant for the Gallia Pontificia online at the German Historical Institute in Paris (DHIP), since April 2023 in the Academy Research Project “Forming Europe by Overcoming Schism in the Twelfth Century” at the RWTH Aachen University. You can find him on Bluesky @sgensicke.bsky.social. (2024–)

Davide Pafumi is a PhD candidate at the English department of the University of Lethbridge, where he specialises in English and Digital Humanities. His research focuses on the discourse analysis of love in the English later Middle Ages, employing vector space models to explore semantics in mediaeval literary texts. Since September 2022, he has been serving as a Graduate Research and Teaching Assistant for the Humanities Innovation Lab. In this role, he contributes to the Canterbury Tales Project and supports teaching activities in the Department of English. Additionally, he is actively involved in copy-editing for Digital Medievalist, Digital Studies/Le Champ Numérique, and Vox Medii Aevii. Davide earned a MA’s in European and American Languages and Literatures from the University of Padua, Italy. (2025–)

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 was 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–)

Cihan Şimşek (Institutional homepage) is a research assistant in medieval history at Kilis 7 Aralık University. He earned his BA in History from Hacettepe University in Ankara and his MA in Medieval History from Ege University in İzmir, the city where he was born and raised. Currently, he is navigating the challenges of his PhD at the University of Szeged where he is engaged in research on medieval political ecumenes and structures. His research interests include, but are not limited to, mounted pastoral nomads, the Global Middle Ages, political etiquette and symbolism, and frontier interactions, particularly those between the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary. When time allows, he enjoys working on data science, coding in Python and Pascal, experimenting with Kraken for handwritten text recognition, and developing large language models (LLMs). He is not particularly active on social media, but for those interested in his works, he has an Academia.edu profile. (2025–)

Former Members

Hannah Busch. Ph.D. candidate, Leiden University, Researcher at CCeH/University of Cologne. (2019–24)

Nathan Daniels. Ph.D. candidate in History, Johns Hopkins University. (2019–22)

Catrin Haberfield. Ph.D. candidate, Stanford University. (2022–25)

James B. Harr, III. Ph.D. in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media, North Carolina State University. (2019–23)

Ségolène Gence. Ph.D. in Medieval Studies, University of Kent. (2023–25)

Tessa Gengnagel. Ph.D. in Information Processing (Digital Humanities), University of Cologne. (2019–23)

Estelle Guéville. Ph.D. in Medieval Studies, Yale University. (2023–25)

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)