Brief profiles of workshop participants

Workshop Participants

Ruth Ahnert, Professor of Literary History and Digital Humanities, Queen Mary University of London.

Ruth’s research sits at the intersection of early modern literary history, archival studies, and data science. Her recent publications include Tudor Networks of Power (co-authored with S.E. Ahnert, Oxford 2023), Collaborative Historical Research in the Age of Big Data (co-authored with E. Griffin, M. Ridge and G. Tolfo, Cambridge 2023), and The Network Turn (co-authored with S.E. Ahnert, C.N. Coleman, and S.B. Weingart, Cambridge 2020). She also led the flag-ship Alan Turing Institute project Living with Machines for five years until it ended in August 2023.

Twitter: @ruthahnert; Bluesky: @ruthahnert.bsky.social

Rafael Nieto-Bello, Ph.D. Candidate. Department of History at The University of Texas at Austin.

Rafael Nieto-Bello is a fourth-year Colombian Ph.D. student in History at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the relationships between knowledge, race, religion, and the environment in the early modern Caribbean. Specifically, he specializes in exploring the Catholic production of knowledge through “Spiritual Chorographies” - archival records that documented and reflected on the lands and communities of Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and Spanish settlers. By studying these records, Rafael aims to deepen our understanding of the complex history of the early modern Caribbean, including its cultural mobility and dynamism. His research also sheds light on the formation of racial categorizations in the Atlantic world and their lasting impacts on the development of modern humanities epistemologies.

Flavia Bruni, Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Chieti-Pescara and a member of the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities (VeDPH)

From 2017 to 2021 I worked as a librarian at the Central Institute for the Union Catalogue of Italian Libraries and for bibliographic information (ICCU), where I was responsible for the cataloguing of early printed materials within the Union Catalogue of Italian Libraries SBN, for cataloguing courses, training and internships, and for international relationships. From 2015 to 2021 I was a Honorary Research Fellow in Book History at the School of History of the University of St Andrews as an associate with the Universal Short Title Catalogue project, where I worked as a Research Assistant from 2009 to 2015. As a book historian, bibliographer and qualified professional librarian, my research focuses on Counter-Reformation Italy, and, as a source and companion to that, on early printed books, libraries and censorship in the early modern age, especially in the sixteenth century.

Kayla Campana, Texts and Technology Ph.D. Student, University of Central Florida

Kayla Elizabeth Campana is a first-year Texts and Technology Ph.D. student at the University of Central Florida. She earned both her Bachelor’s and master’s in history, along with a Gender Studies graduate certificate. She currently serves as a Digital Archive Assistant with a digital humanities project called PRINT.

Eva Chodějovská, External Lecturer in the Department of Auxiliary Historical Sciences and Archival Studies, Masaryk University

Eva serves as a map librarian at Moravian Library in Brno, Czechia, being a curator of the UNESCO-listed Bernard Paul Moll´s composite atlas, and teaches the history of cartography and urban history at Masaryk University in Brno. Generally, she deals with space, its perception, and (visual) representations in pre-modern Europe. Eva has published several books and articles on the Grand tour and travel in the early modern era with a special focus on travels from Central Europe to Rome and collaborated for ten years on the European Historic Towns Atlas project.

Adam Franklin-Lyons, Associate Professor of History, Emerson College

Bart Holterman, Research Associate, German Maritime Museum

I am a postdoc researcher at the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven and the University of Göttingen. Next to research projects about late medieval and early modern trade in the North Atlantic, I developed and maintain the Viabundus dataset, which encompasses a web map of historical roads and waterways for a large part of northern Europe in the period 1350-1650.

Koh Choon Hwee, Assistant Professor of History, University of California Los Angeles

Koh Choon Hwee is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) working on the Ottoman postal system. She retweets @ OttomanChoon and reposts on bluesky @ superoldgranny.

Wouter Kreuze, Postdoctoral Fellow at the German Historical Institute Washington and George Mason University (Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media)

As a postdoctoral researcher, I am endeavoring to develop a new digital method for the collection and analysis of the large extant quantities of handwritten news. This would allow for a better understanding of travel routes of the news and its patterns of dissemination.

Brecht Nijman, Junior Researcher, Huygens Institute (KNAW), Amsterdam, NL.

Brecht Nijman holds an MA in History from the University of Edinburgh and an MSc in Applied Data Science from Utrecht University. Currently she is a Junior Researcher at the Huygens Institute (Amsterdam, NL) where she works on the GLOBALISE project, which aims to unlock the Dutch East India Company archive (1602-1797).

Chiara Palladino, Assistant Professor of Classics; Furman University

Chiara Palladino works predominantly on computational modeling and semantic annotation methods applied to premodern languages. She specializes in two main areas: the study of Greco-Roman spatial perception with digital methods, and the development of innovative NLP methodologies for the automatic analysis of Ancient Greek texts.

My latest publications are visible here

Molly Taylor-Poleskey, Map Librarian, Harvard Libraries

Dr. Taylor-Poleskey is a cultural historian of early modern Europe specializing in food history, travel, cultural exchange, and the history of cartography. Before joining the Harvard Map Collection, she was Associate Professor of Digital History at Middle Tennessee State University where she and her students collaborated with local heritage institutions on public history projects such as Hidden Town in 3D. Her first book, The Great Elector’s Table: The Politics of Food in Seventeenth-Century Brandenburg-Prussia, is forthcoming in 2024 with the University of Virginia Press and she is working on her next book about the poison scandal that rocked the Berlin court in Berlin in 1687.

Sandra Toffolo, Researcher, Italian-German Historical Institute, Trento (Italy)

Sandra Toffolo is a researcher at the Italian-German Historical Institute in Trento. She is an historian specialised in mobility, space, and the circulation of people, objects, and ideas in the early modern period.

Ali Coşkun Tunçer, Professor of Economic History in the Department of History, University College London

Coşkun Tunçer is an economic historian with a focus on the history of financial markets and the Middle East in the early modern and modern eras. He obtained his PhD from the London School of Economics in 2011 and has been teaching at University College London since 2013. His current research projects include urban wealth inequality in the Ottoman Empire from 1600 to 1914 and the development of the stock markets in the Middle East from 1870 to 1914.