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.

Rachel Di Cresce is the Special Collections Librarian for Book Science at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, who partners with researchers to develop research services and projects using UTL’s deep and unique collections. As part of the team that builds and maintains institutional digital collections, her areas of focus include investigating new data standards, softwares and repositories, working on metadata standards that enable discovery of collections and new research, and building new research tools for the study of rare materials. Di Cresce has worked closely with OBNS over the past 12 years as the Project Librarian for Digital Tools for Manuscript Study, The Book and The Silk Roads, and Hidden Stories. 

Melissa Moreton is a codicologist and scholar of the history of the book, particularly interested in material culture and the development and exchange of manuscript technologies across Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas. Her research revolves around the ways in which individuals and communities are connected through the production, use, and exchange of books and the materials used to make them. Moreton is a Research Associate at the Institute for Advanced Study, where she works on projects relating to global book history (1000–1700) and Indigenous language and cultural revitalization. More at https://www.ias.edu/scholars/melissa-moreton

Andrew Nelson is Professor -Archaeology/Biological Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology at Western University. A specialist in the use of radiography and other imaging techniques to non-destructively capture and analyze human remains and artifacts from archaeological sites as well as other objects of cultural heritage significance, Nelson has been a close collaborator with OBNS since 2019, exploring the applications of micro-computed tomography to the study of historical book structures (Sargan et al. 2022 and forthcoming; YouTube videos 1 and 2). The CT image we use for the OBNS website banner is from Nelson’s research. See his faculty page.

Sebastian Sobecki is Professor of Later Medieval English Literature, University of Toronto, St George, with a cross-appointment in the Centre for Medieval Studies. His research and teaching extend to a wide area of late medieval and early modern literature, with a focus on law, travel, authorship, and institutions in the literary history of the long fifteenth century. He is particularly interested in Chaucer, Hoccleve, Kempe, and London’s literary culture. Manuscripts and palaeography are central to his practice and his work with OBNS: he is the PI of the SSHRC Insight Grant Communities of Practice: Scripts, Scribes, and the Production of Literature in London, 1377-1471 which combines machine learning with traditional palaeography. See his faculty page.