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 postdoc in Computer Philology and Medieval Studies at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. She holds a PhD from the University of Verona, Italy, where she developed a TEI XML synoptic digital edition of Lambrecht’s Alexanderlied, a medieval German epic on Alexander the Great. She also has a MA in Linguistics from the University of Pavia, Italy, and a Postgraduate Certificate in Digital Humanities from University College London. She currently gives lectures and seminars on Medieval German and Digital Humanities and works on text and image annotation, historical linguistics, manuscript studies and controlled vocabularies. (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 an independent scholar living in Salzburg, Austria. 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 Gensicke studied History and historical auxiliary sciences 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), than (2023-2026) 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 research assistant at the English department of the University of Lethbridge, where he earned his PhD in 2026 specialising in Digital Humanities and Medieval Studies. His interdisciplinary research involves discourse studies, digital methodologies, linguistic and literary studies of early and contemporary Germanic cultures as well as the scholarship of teaching and learning. Since September 2022, he has been contributing to several projects at the Humanities Innovation Lab. Some of these projects are: the Canterbury Tales Project, the Journal Incubator, the Humanities Data Inquiry, and #safespaces, spanning textual criticism through academic freedom. Moreover, he works as a scientific consult for the Université de Montréal, the Manuscript as Data Research Group at UPenn, and has been involved in various executive roles within the Medieval Association of the Pacific, the International Courtly Literature Society (North American Branch) and the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities. Davide has also served at various titles in several editorial boards including Digital Medievalist, Digital Studies/Le Champ Numérique, and Vox Medii Aevii. He earned his MA in European and American Languages and Literatures from the University of Padua, Italy, and his bachelor form the University of Messina. (2025–)
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 political structures among the early Hungarians. He is also a PhD candidate at Nevşehir Hacı Bektaş Veli University, where his research focuses on the issues of collapse and transformation in Late Antiquity from the perspective of his political ecumene model. Last but not least, he works on Giovanni Manardo and his Epistolae medicinales, as well as network models of the medical republic of letters. Besides these graduate research topics, his research interests include, but are not limited to, mounted pastoral nomads, History of Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Baltics, 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.He was not particularly active on social media, but after some persistent encouragement, he opened a Bluesky account at @cihantarih.bsky.social Those interested in his work can also find his Academia.edu profile, which he updates from time to time. (2025–)
Celis Tittse is a PhD candidate in the PhysMs project at Radboud University, specialising in manuscript studies and the computational analysis of medieval textual and visual culture. He holds an MA in Medieval History and an MSc in Applied Data Science from Utrecht University, and a BA in History from Radboud University. His research examines the transmission and transformation of texts in medieval manuscripts, combining palaeography, visual analysis, and Latin philology with computational methods such as network analysis, natural language processing, machine learning, Handwritten Text Recognition. Within PhysMs, he studies the metadata and computational analysis of Latin Physiologus and bestiary manuscripts. Additionally, he is interested in the methodological and epistemological implications of applying computational methods to historical sources. (2026–)
Autumn Yun-Ting Tsai is an MA student at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto. Her current research interests surround musical-world harmony and manuscript studies between Insular-Continental cultures from the sixth century onwards. Her thesis at Fu Jen Catholic University examined the assimilation of the harmony of the spheres into Dante’s Christian worldview and the mystical silence of Saturn. She continues to enjoy reading marginal notes of Dante’s readers and welcomes direct inquiries concerning creative collaborations. (2026–)
Former Members
Sebastian Dows-Miller. Ph.D. in Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford. (2022-26)
Catrin Haberfield. Ph.D. candidate, Stanford University. (2022–25)
Julia Pelosi-Thorpe. Ph.D. candidate in Italian Studies/Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania. (2023-25)
Philipp Schneider. Ph.D. candidate in Digital History, Humboldt University of Berlin. (2023-25)
Ségolène Gence. Ph.D. in Medieval Studies, University of Kent. (2023–25)
Estelle Guéville. Ph.D. in Medieval Studies, Yale University. (2023–25)
Hannah Busch. Ph.D. candidate, Leiden University, Researcher at CCeH/University of Cologne. (2019–24)
Tessa Gengnagel. Ph.D. in Information Processing (Digital Humanities), University of Cologne. (2019–23)
James B. Harr, III. Ph.D. in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media, North Carolina State University. (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)
Nathan Daniels. Ph.D. candidate in History, Johns Hopkins University. (2019–22)
