DM Board Elections 2025-2029

Digital Medievalist is holding elections to fill five positions on its Executive Board for the 2025–2029 term. Voting will take place by electronic ballot from Monday, 28 July 2025, 12:00pm UTC to Monday, 11 August 2025, 12:00pm UTC.

Ten candidates are standing for election to five seats [in alphabetical order]. Congratulations to our winning candidates, indicated in bold below, and thanks to all the candidates for their willingness to run and to provide such a rich and varied slate of talent:

Members will receive an email from the Helios Voting System with instructions on how to cast their vote. For short biographies and personal statements, please see below.

If you have any questions, please contact the 2025 Elections Committee: Luise Borek and N. Kıvılcım Yavuz.

Candidates 2025-2029 [in alphabetical order]

Caterina Agostini 

Caterina Agostini 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. Agostini has contributed to several major federally funded projects, including The Thomas A. Edison Papers and an edition of Goro Dati’s “La Sfera” (“The Globe”), a fifteenth-century cosmographic poem. 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. As co-chair of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), Agostini advocates for open, scalable standards for digital imaging and annotation that facilitate manuscript research and global cultural heritage initiatives. Her methodological interests include IIIF implementation, geospatial visualization, and machine learning applications for historical texts. Her publications address figures such as Galileo Galilei and Benvenuto Cellini, and engage topics including material book history, digital textuality, and Renaissance travel literature. She has curated exhibitions at the intersection of book history and material culture, such as “Making Books Count” (Notre Dame) and “Currency, Culture, and the Ron D’Argenio Collection” (Seton Hall). Currently, she is preparing a parallel-text digital edition of the “China Root Letter” by Andreas Vesalius.

I am presenting my candidacy for the Digital Medievalist Executive Board, motivated by a deep commitment to advancing the integration of digital methodologies within medieval and early modern studies. My scholarly work as a historian of science and digital humanist engages extensively with manuscript cultures and the production of digital editions, underscoring the critical importance of rigorous, accessible, and interoperable digital scholarship. Participation in the Executive Board would enable me to contribute to the governance and strategic development of a community that has become essential to fostering interdisciplinary collaboration among scholars, librarians, and technologists. My experience as Co-Principal Investigator on projects such as The Chymistry of Isaac Newton and the Thomas Harriot Papers, alongside my role as co-chair of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), has equipped me with expertise in managing complex digital humanities initiatives, promoting open standards, and advocating for sustainable digital infrastructures. I am committed to leveraging this experience to support the Digital Medievalist community’s efforts to facilitate equitable access to medieval and early modern cultural heritage materials through digital methods and tools. Furthermore, I am dedicated to fostering an inclusive and supportive professional environment that encourages the exchange of ideas, the development of technical skills, and the advancement of innovative research methodologies. Serving on the Executive Board represents an opportunity to help shape the future direction of digital medieval studies, ensuring its continued growth and relevance within the broader scholarly landscape.

Catherine Albers-Morris

Catherine Albers-Morris (Ph.D. in English, University of Rochester, 2025) is a scholar of medieval literature and digital humanities, applying digital methods to the study of medieval manuscripts and material culture in the Mediterranean, especially multilingual cultures like Arab-Norman Sicily. She has recently accepted a position as Assistant Professor of English at Rochester Institute of Technology, where she was a Visiting Lecturer. Albers-Morris began her training in multispectral imaging as a tool for recovery of medieval manuscripts as a Project Coordinator for The Lazarus Project, during which time MSI drew her to digital humanities by foregrounding the potential of using scientific and computational methods for humanities research. She is a founding member of Videntes: A Multispectral Imaging Collective, an interdisciplinary group studying the collection of the Fondazione Museo del Tesoro del Duomo e Archivio Capitolare di Vercelli. In partnership with them, she taught a summer digital humanities institute focused on medieval objects (Medieval Manuscripts in a Modern World, 2024). In addition to MSI, her research deploys photogrammetry and virtual environments (Unreal, Unity) as a means of digitally preserving and representing medieval material culture, texts, and textual objects. She also has experience with digital humanities approaches such as mapping softwares and databases (Omeka, Heurist). As a faculty member at Rochester Institute of Technology, in addition to teaching her students these technological skills, she addresses questions of ethical digital scholarship and how humanities computing helps us further our study of literature of the past.

By joining the Executive Board of Digital Medievalist I want to be a facilitator for an intellectual community and publication that I believe to be of great benefit to digital medieval studies as a field, especially when members of the community are so rarely able to gather in one space. After participating in Digital Medieval Studies Institute workshops in a few roles (as a student with a lightning talk at Medieval Academy of America in 2023 and as an instructor at Leeds International Medieval Congress in 2025) and presenting on panels sponsored by DM (Leeds, 2025), I want to become more active in the community and help make opportunities like these possible for others. As the only medievalist in my university department, I recognize the value of having academic networks and publications as a connection to wider advances in scholarship. As a result, I hope to develop closer relationships with others doing digital work and use my experience collaborating across disciplines and managing projects to benefit a group of like-minded scholars. I’m excited about connecting with the membership of DM and finding ways to support and engage with their work as they advance their disciplines and digital scholarship more broadly. In the past, I have enjoyed organizing panels, conferences, workshops or collaborating to develop ideas for new digital projects. I see joining the Executive Board as an opportunity to contribute to the DM community using those experiences so that we can foster relationships that bring exciting work into spheres of wider engagement. 

Niels Becker

I am a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Munich’s Faculty of Catholic Theology. More precisely, I work at the Institute of Canon Law, where I am responsible for the field of legal history (Fachgebiet Kirchliche Rechtsgeschichte). My previous job at the University of Würzburg introduced me to the somewhat secluded world of canon law. I worked on an edition project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft which was focused on the canon law schools of Paris. While at Würzburg, I attended my first International Congress of Medieval Canon Law and since then have developed an ever-growing love for the field. My background, however, is in modern languages. I began with English, French and Italian (all at Heidelberg University), then thanks to a memorable excursion to Rome decided to add Latin and some Ancient Greek. My passion for Old French and diachronic linguistics made me discover the literatures and languages of the Middle Ages, and following my graduation I was finally able to combine all of my interests by pursuing a PhD in Medieval Latin Philology. I am also a trained teacher and have taught English, French and Latin to students aged 10 to 18. In Munich I teach courses on medieval canon law, Bible studies and the edition of medieval canon law texts. Every year I offer a “milestones in canon law” seminar which brings together students from the Faculty of Theology, the Law Faculty and the Munich Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. I am a member of the Munich Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the German Mediävistikverband and the International Society of Medieval Canon Law (ICMAC). 

I joined DM earlier this year and was immediately impressed not only by the broad range of activities and resources, but also by the accessibility and inclusiveness of the community. I would now like to take this opportunity to play a more active role and contribute to the development of DM within the broader community of medievalists. As a medieval Latinist with a focus on manuscript studies and text editions I’m experiencing first-hand the transformation taking place in medieval philology thanks to digital tools such as OCR, HTR and LLMs. My own edition project reflects this transformation. It began, before my time, as a print-only endeavour and is now an online edition-in-progress which will eventually be published as a fully integrated digital edition. Therefore, as a member of the Executive Board, I would be particularly interested in promoting digital approaches to medieval text and manuscript culture and in connecting scholars working on such approaches. My own research is focused on the history of canon law, an area which is often overlooked in medieval studies, but which can provide fascinating insights into the development of medieval culture, mentality and society. I would be honoured to represent this field on the Executive Board and to work with DM members to promote the use of digital methods for the exploration of medieval jurisprudence. As a teacher, I’m also passionate about education and outreach. A digital platform like DM offers unique possibilities to connect with audiences of all ages and from all walks of life. As a board member, I would love to reach out to the DM community and encourage the development of teaching formats, resources and events that use the possibilities of digital media to convey the fascination of the Middle Ages. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. 

Hannah Busch

After completion of her B.A. and M.A. studies in German-Italian Studies and Textual Scholarship in Bonn, Florence, and Berlin, 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.  Since June 2023, Hannah is a research associate at the Cologne Center for eHumanities at the University of Cologne in Germany. 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 mediaeval written documents and experimentation with computer-aided methods. In addition, Hannah is a member of the DFG Network Open Middle Ages and the editorial team of the academic blog Mittelalter – Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte. She 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. 

From 2019 to 2024 I was one of the founding members of the Digital Medievalist’s Postgraduate Committee. The energy and passion we shared for digital medieval studies, the work on establishing the committee and the podcast Coding Codices, and the empowerment among early career scholars are something that strongly motivates my candidacy for the executive board. Six years after establishing the Postgraduate Committee it is about time for us to take over seats in the Executive Board. In 2021, 2023, and 2024 I co-organized three roundtables at Leeds, sponsored by the Postgraduate Committee, which not only gave us an opportunity to meet in person, but also to expand our communication to a larger community and to discuss our situation as digital humanists in medieval studies in a safe space. These meetings have always been a great source of inspiration and empowerment for me and others. As a member of the Executive Board, I want to actively promote the mission of the Digital Medievalist towards becoming a more global and diverse community.

Louis I. Hamilton

Louis I. Hamilton is Professor of History and Dean of the Albert Dorman Honors College at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). He is co-Director of the Center of Humanities in Extended Reality, and co-PI of the Digital Spatial History Lab at NJIT. Since 2013 he has led the Rome Research Group, a team of undergraduate researchers who have created perhaps the largest database of the street shrines (edicole sacre) of Rome, and the only database actively tracking devotional activity at the shrines. He is the author of A Sacred City: Consecrating Churches and Reforming Society in Eleventh-Century Italy (Manchester, 2010). He is the co-editor of: Susan L. Boynton and Hamilton, A Cultural History of Religion in the Middle Ages (London, forthcoming); Hamilton and Stefano Riccioni, Rome Re-Imagined: Twelfth-Century Jews, Christians, and Muslims Encounter the Eternal City (Leiden, 2011); Christopher M. Bellitto and Hamilton, Reforming the Church before Modernity: Patterns, Problems, and Approaches (Aldershot, 2005). Since 2010 he has been using an evolving list of GIS tools to teach Dante in his upper-level undergraduate course: Dante: Hell, Heaven, and Florence (see, Louis I. Hamilton, “Virtual Cities: GIS as a Tool for the Analysis of Dante’s Commedia,” Pedagogy 13:1 (2013), 115-23.

Computational tools have been an important part of medieval studies for three-quarters of a century. These tools are at once commonplace and not fully integrated into our research, graduate training, and pedagogy. The challenges to such an integration include the rapid change in computational tools, in comparison to the slow pace of a large research project, and an academic culture that prizes the individual project over the collaborative. Yet collaboration is necessary to successfully apply new technologies to large-scale projects that advance both our research and pedagogical goals. If elected to serve on the Executive Board, I would look forward to working with my colleagues to strengthen and make visible especially those initiatives that promote accessibility of cutting-edge tools to the broadest possible community of medieval scholars. Training in such tools is fundamentally practical as they can solve complex research questions even as they extend the translatable skills we teach undergraduates, the vast majority of whom will go on to work and live outside of academia. In my own career, I have seen how these tools have expanded my understanding of the Middle Ages, allowed students in my classes to dive more deeply and more quickly into the sources, and has provided them with additional skills that have directly benefited them after graduation whether in PhD programs in medieval studies and related fields, or in a range of positions from architecture, civil engineering, data systems analysis, education, game design, law, mass transit, programming, publishing, to urban planning.

Katarzyna Anna Kapitan

I am a manuscript scholar and digital humanist specialising in Old Norse-Icelandic literature and culture. Currently, I hold the Junior Professor Chair in Computational Analysis of Written Cultures in Western Space at the École nationale des chartes – PSL University.  I’ve been a member of DM since 2015 and in 2021 I was elected to serve on the DM executive board as subsequently appointed by the board to serve as its deputy director. My research interests include the transmission and circulation history of literary works in the intellectual networks of pre-modern Scandinavia, digital scholarly editing of pre-modern texts and digital cataloguing of manuscripts, as well as the application of computational approaches to estimating the loss rates of medieval works and manuscripts. My recent monograph, Lost but Not Forgotten: The Saga of Hrómundur and Its Manuscript Transmission (Oxford 2024), examined the transmission history of the post-medieval adaptations of the lost medieval saga of Hrómundur, a legendary great-grandfather of the first settlers of Iceland, Ingólfur and Leifur. The study includes text-critical editions of three versions of the story, which are also available online as interactive digital editions. My current project “Digital Approaches to the Survival and Loss of Old Norse Romances” examines the survival and loss of Old Norse romances, works heavily influenced by continental genres of the Middle Ages. The goal is to leverage recent developments in digital humanities to uncover which features of texts and their manuscripts may have contributed to the survival and loss of medieval literary works.

It has been a great honour to serve on the Digital Medievalist Executive Board for the past three years as Deputy Director and to witness first-hand how our collective efforts have led to several important, and in some cases ongoing, transformations across the organisation. During this time, we worked to increase the visibility of the Digital Medievalist community by maintaining a strong and welcoming presence at major conferences, such as the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, as well as by organising and supporting online events and training opportunities. I contributed directly to these initiatives through my role on the Conference Committee. Simultaneously, I served on the Editorial Board of the Digital Medievalist journal, contributing to both editorial workflows and strategic planning. I would welcome the opportunity to continue working with both committees to fulfil DM’s mission of making digital medieval scholarship accessible and discoverable. Over the past year, we developed a targeted strategy to support early career scholars and medievalists from underrepresented backgrounds, with the goal of shaping a more inclusive and representative board. As part of this effort, we undertook a major revision of the organisation’s bylaws and internal policies, in the implementation of which I played a significant role. These revisions formalised collaboration with the Postgraduate Committee and the Editorial Board, and introduced reserved seats through a reformed electoral process. In the coming years, I would like to see through the remaining policy updates and pursue new initiatives, including the implementation of a mentorship scheme for early career researchers and the development of additional free training opportunities for medievalists.

S.C. Kaplan

I was introduced to DH during graduate school when I crashed a symposium at George Washington University while visiting a friend a few weeks before starting an intro to DH course at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). While my first big project, focused on watermarks, is now defunct, the second (co-created with Sarah Wilma Watson) is still up and still expanding: Books of Duchesses. After completing a PhD in French Literature at UCSB, I spent a further year there as a lecturer, followed by three years as a lecturer at Rice University, a short pandemic-related break, and a further three and a half years as a lecturer at UCSB again. In Fall 2024, I joined LA Tech as Assistant Professor of French, and I’m slated to co-teach my own Intro to DH course in Spring 2026. My research interests include late medieval women’s book collections and the history of libraries that properly take into account books that are no longer extant; mapping medieval women’s movements; image-text relations; and women as the intersections of language, literary dissemination, and politics.

I have been interested in taking a more active role in some of the organizations I belong to for several years now, but this is the first time since graduate school that I have had assurances about being at one institution for more than a year at a stretch, which means it’s now time to step up. I’m interested in being part of the Digital Medievalist Executive Board in particular for multiple reasons. First, I’ve had the opportunity to benefit from its programming at conferences such as the IMC Leeds both as presenter and audience member, and I would like to play an active role in shaping those opportunities for others. Second, I find collaborative work to be particularly enjoyable and motivating. Finally, I am sure that in the course of working with the other board members on a regular basis, I will have the opportunity to learn a lot—about DH projects and tools that already exist, about some that are upcoming, and things that are completely outside my wheelhouse, all of which will help me help the medieval DH community in the future.

María Morrás

I am Senior Lecturer of Spanish Literature at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and Honorary Research Fellow at Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford. A medievalist by training, my research interests focus on the fifteenth-century Iberian literature with special attention to humanism, the reception of classics, translations, the history of ideas in relation to moral and political literature, and the intersection between power, gender and sanctity. I have edited several medieval and golden-age texts, and I am author of several reflective articles on the impact of the digital humanities in medieval studies. My exposure to digital humanities began as a PhD student at University of California, Berkeley. I am currently coordinator of Philobiblon, the oldest database on Iberian Vernacular Manuscripts of the Middle Ages.

The practice and theory of DH requires a specific mainframe, which is still alien to most departments of humanities: working in collaboration, both with medievalists from other disciplines and academic traditions and with experts in digital aspects, and counting with human and technical infrastructure. My objective in joining the board of Digital Medievalist is to strive for a wider medieval DH community, where knowledge and experience can be shared beyond the best and better provided for centres, incorporating younger researchers and creating opportunities in teaching, disseminating and research, and enhance collaboration with the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) sector to collaborate across countries, for example, with the European Union in the Cultural Heritage programmes.

Dot Porter

As the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies Curator of Digital Humanities, Dot Porter 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 decades-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.

I have been involved in digital medieval studies for over two decades, and with the Digital Medievalist community from its earliest days. I served on the DM Editorial Board from 2006 to 2010 and as Lead Editor in 2008–2009. It has been a joy to watch the community grow and diversify in the years since, and I am excited about the opportunity to serve on the Executive Board again to support the community into the future. My work has always bridged medieval studies and digital practices. I both lead large digitization and software development projects, including VisColl and Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis, and coordinate programming that fosters broad public and scholarly engagement with manuscripts both digital and physical. Recently I have become involved in projects falling under the “#dhmakes” rubric, that involve bringing digitized manuscripts back into the physical world in creative ways. At the same time, I am guiding work at Penn to use Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) to make our extensive manuscript collection available as transcriptions. I know this is quite a variety of interest and experience! I range from collaborative digital scholarship, to digital pedagogy, to project leadership, and I believe all of these are vital for the stated goals of DM to meet the increasingly sophisticated demands faced by designers of contemporary digital projects. I would be thrilled to return to the DM Executive Board and support the community.

Evina Stein

Evina Stein 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 a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project SCRIBEMUS at the University of Pavia, where she works on the earliest evidence of writing music from the diocese of Lyon. She has previously 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 a PI of 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.

I have been a member of the Digital Medievalist community for many years. I am keen to take on a more active role and contribute to its leadership with my experience and particular focus. I would be particularly interested in contributing to the running of DM journal and organizing DM events.

DM Board Nominations 2025-2029

Digital Medievalist is excited to invite nominations for five members to join its Executive Board for a four-year term starting August 2025. Whether you are a long-time contributor or new to the community, we warmly encourage you to consider standing for election or to nominate someone you believe would be a great fit.

The Executive Board plays a key role in shaping the direction of the organisation. Board members work collaboratively on running the journal, maintaining the website and mailing list, organising events and conference sessions, and supporting our presence across platforms. Members attend regular meetings and share in the work of keeping Digital Medievalist active and inclusive.

Eligibility

To stand for election, candidates must be members of Digital Medievalist (membership is conferred by subscribing to our mailing list, dm-l) and have made a demonstrable contribution to Digital Medievalist or the wider field of digital medieval studies.

New for 2025: Reserved DEI Seats

As part of our commitment to building a more inclusive and representative organisation, two of the five open seats in this election will be reserved for candidates from underrepresented or minoritised communities. This is in part a response to patterns observed in past elections, where candidates from diverse backgrounds and scholars based outside Europe and North America often stood for election but were not elected. The reserved seats are one step toward addressing this imbalance and ensuring that a broader range of voices helps shape the future of Digital Medievalist.

For these reserved seats, we welcome nominations from individuals who come from communities that have been historically underrepresented in the field, including but not limited to scholars who are BIPOC, LGBTQ+, disabled, from outside Europe and North America, affiliated with institutions outside Europe and North America, or whose work focuses on non-Western, non-European, or non-Latin digital medieval traditions. These new seats will complement the diversity that already exists within our board regarding gender, socioeconomic background, and sexuality, creating a more comprehensive approach to inclusive representation. Candidates eligible for these seats are asked to self-identify confidentially in the nomination form. They may also express their position in their motivation statement if they wish, though this is not required.

If you are interested in standing for election or are able to recommend a candidate, please complete the 2025 nomination form. Alternatively, you can contact this year’s Elections Committee comprised of Luise Borek (luise.borek@tu-darmstadt.de) and N. Kıvılcım Yavuz (n.k.yavuz@leeds.ac.uk) who will treat your nomination or enquiries confidentially.

The call for nominations is open until 23:59 UTC on Friday 11 July 2025. Elections will be held by electronic ballot in July 2025.