Sara Ameri is a PhD student at the Department of English, University of Toronto. Her project focuses on medieval devotional and mystical texts and their conceptualization of the medieval plague from a psychoanalytic perspective. She is also interested in postmodern theories of madness and writing and their precedents and manifestations in medieval works.

Alexandra Atiya is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Medieval Studies who focuses on late medieval English and Iberian literature. Her dissertation looks at the intersection of economic history and drama, identifying how contemporary economic issues helped to shape dramatic forms, particularly in morality and miracle plays. She was an RA for the Records of Early English Drama and is joining The Book and the Silk Roads project.

Arkaprabha Chakraborty is a PhD student in English at the University of Toronto. He completed a BA and an MA in English from Jadavpur University and an MPhil in Medieval English Studies from the University of Oxford. His research interests are in the documentation and materials enabling transcontinental mobility between Europe, West Asia and the Maghreb in the Middle Ages. He is also interested in new medievalisms and postcolonial literatures in English.

Julianna Chianelli is a Direct Entry PhD Candidate in the University of Toronto’s Department of English. Her research is concerned with Middle English literary texts of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries that use seals and the language of sigillography to explore inherited ideas about identity, and generate powerful and enduring new ones. Julianna is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Canada Graduate Scholarship; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship; the Ontario Graduate Scholarship; UofT’s Doctoral Completion Award; and the UTM June Scott Teaching Excellence Award.

Una Creedon-Carey is an OBNS Lab Manager and a PhD candidate in English at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation maps queer modes of resistance to the category of the human in Old English literature. Her other academic interests include medieval medicine and medieval reception in the digital age. She also runs a palaeography reading group that is an offshoot of the OBNS lab.

Lawrence Evalyn is a Teaching Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of Toronto, affiliated with the Data Sciences Institute. He recently completed his PhD at the University of Toronto, and also holds an MA in English from the University of Victoria. His doctoral research examines the material histories of digital archives, measuring uneven digitization as it impacts eighteenth-century studies. Other projects have involved social network mapping and corpus-based distant reading, with new research in video game studies. Find him on Twitter @lawrenceevalyn.

Cai Henderson is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies and holds an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of York. In addition to work for OBNS, Cai is part of the Henry Daniel Project, and does palaeography and translation for Records of Early English Drama. Cai currently works on cognition and theories of the mind in late medieval English literature and text technology and tweets from @cemhend.

Jessica Henderson is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto. Her doctoral work focuses on the codicological contexts, textual forms and literary implications of Middle English medical verse texts. As a part of this work, she in the process of producing editions of several of these previously-unedited verses: two lengthy texts in particular, a herbarium and receptarium. Jess is also a member of the Henry Daniel Project whose reading edition of the 14^th C medical compendium, Liber Uricrisiarum, has just been published in 2020 with the University of Toronto Press.

Merium Khan is the OBNS Lab Manager and an administrative assistant for The Book and the Silk Roads project. She received her BA in English from the University of Toronto, Mississauga where she focused in early modern natural philosophy and devotional poetry, and her MA from the University of Western Ontario.

Jessica Lockhart is Head of Research of OBNS and of the Book and the Silk Roads projects, with teaching interests in global literatures of the premodern world, as well as medieval literatures of the British Isles. Jess received her PhD in 2017 from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies. As Head of Research, Jess contributes to vision and helps ensure that the Book and the Silk Roads achieves its research goals. Find her on Twitter @lockhartjj.

James Malinowski is a Research Administrator for OBNS and is responsible for budgeting and finances as well as human resources for the current research project The Book and the Silk Roads. He received both his BA in English Literature, History and Philosophy, and his MA in English Literature from the University of Toronto. James’ research interests include religion and imperialism in the 19^th century novel, postcolonial theory, and global literature and history.

J. R. Mattison is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. She holds a BA from Yale and an MPhil from Oxford. Her work focuses on the reading and circulation of French manuscripts in fifteenth-century England. 

Morgan Moore is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies. She holds an MA in Medieval Welsh Literature from Aberystwyth University and a BA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies from Wellesley College. Her work deals with medieval performance, especially vernacular verse and drama, and its transmission in manuscript from medieval England and Wales. Morgan also engages with digital humanities tools and research in her work with the Records of Early English Drama, and as Teaching Assistant for Professor Bolintineanu’s undergraduate global medieval studies courses.

Katheryne Morrissette is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Toronto. Her project investigates the making and maintaining of both material and metaphorical whiteness in medieval scientific, medical, and literary texts, as well as craft recipes. Hailing from Montreal, Kat received her BA and MA in English Literature from Concordia University.

J. D. Sargan is a postdoctoral fellow in the Old Books, New Science Lab. Before coming to Toronto he studied at Queen Mary University of London (BA), and the University of Oxford (MSt, DPhil), and taught for Magdalen College, University of Oxford, and The Warburg Institute. James is now working on his first book, ‘Reading Early Middle English Books’. His current research project, ‘Space-Time and the Manuscript: 4D Modelling in Medieval Book Design’, which is based in the lab, is funded by the Leverhulme Trust. He can be found tweeting on behalf of the lab @oldbooksnewsci.

Lab Partners

Suzanne Conklin Akbari is Professor of Medieval Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, after serving as Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. She has written books on optics and allegory (Seeing Through the Veil) and European views of Islam and the Orient (Idols in the East), and edited collections on travel literature (Marco Polo), Mediterranean Studies (A Sea of Languages), and somatic histories (The Ends of the Body), plus How We Write (2015) and How We Read (2019). Her most recent book is The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer (2020), co-edited with James Simpson. Akbari is finishing up a monograph called Small Change: Metaphor and Metamorphosis in Chaucer and Christine de Pizan, and working on another one, The Shape of Time, on premodern ideas of periodization. A co-editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature, Akbari co-hosts a literature podcast called The Spouter Inn. She can be found on both https://suzanneakbari.com and https://www.megaphonic.fm/spouter.

Alexandra Bolintineanu is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, in Medieval Digital Studies, at the University of Toronto.  She is cross-appointed to the Centre for Medieval Studies and Woodsworth College.  Her current project, Technologies of Unknowing, is a study of medieval wonders in digital environments.  She holds a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies and a B.Sc. in Computer Science (University of Toronto).  Her research interests include digital humanities, Old and Middle English narrative, marvels, monsters, and imaginary geographies.

Sian Meikle is Associate Chief Librarian for Digital Strategies and Technology, and oversees planning and implementation of library technology and digital services at the University of Toronto Libraries. Her background lies in the development of web services for the library, digital scholarly resources in the humanities, and digitization. She holds a BSc in applied mathematics and zoology, and a MLS from the University of Toronto.