To get involved, please reach out to one of the faculty below.
Adam Franklin-Lyons (Professor of Medieval History at Emerson College)
A focus on the food supply in the Western Mediterranean culminated in the monograph, Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon. (The Crown of Aragon roughly corresponds to the modern regions of Catalonia, Valencia, Aragon, parts of Languedoc-Roussillon, and the Balearic Islands.) Adam’s current work on communication, news, and travel covers the same region and grows directly out of his curiosity about the transmission of knowledge about grain prices and market conditions during food crises. When governments needed information (including the price of grain), they didn’t want to guess; they sent messengers. Projects include Couriers in the Crown of Aragon, the Datini Letter Collection, and the The Itineraries Project.
David Gary Shaw (Professor of History and Medieval Studies at Wesleyan University) 
Within medieval history, Gary Shaw’s current research interests include the circulation of people, things, animals, and ideas in later medieval England, and it is in this area that his interest in the Travelers Lab began. His current book project on this topic is tentatively called “Travelling to the Future. Networks of Modernity in Medieval England,” and several aspects have spawned additional research plans that the Travelers Lab will attempt to pursue. These will include the Database of Medieval Mobility, The English Friars Settlement project, the Episcopal Travel project, a project on aspects of judicial mobility, and the mapping of centers of accommodation and hospitality. Methodologically, his work has heavily used GIS solutions, but we anticipate further work involving increasing network analysis in the coming years.
Jesse W. Torgerson (Associate Professor of Letters, Medieval Studies, History at Wesleyan University)
The possibility of travel rests on spaces through which to move, which is the focus of the C-DER Project (Constantinopolitana: Database of East Rome). C-DER grew out of the student-centered map-based encyclopedia Constantinople as Palimpsest (conjoined with the Wesleyan course Constantinople: between Rome and Istanbul). This ongoing initiative works to account for place (as a balance to historians’ predilection for time) within historical survey, as lab team and students and scholars together develop our database of every bit of surviving evidence for ‘Byzantine’ Constantinople (ca. 200-1500). A second ongoing project–first stage: Geography and Narrative in the Chronicle of Theophanes–has now become a mind-bending project to visualize the contents of medieval chronicles as a social network of historical epistemology: Comparing Chronicles.
Network Members
Helen Birkett (Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Exeter)
Helen Birkett’s work focuses on the intellectual and religious culture of twelfth-century Britain and Ireland, with a particular interest in literary sources, networks, and communication. Her current research concerns the idea of news in the Middle Ages and seeks to engage with bigger debates going on in early modern and modern scholarship on this topic. She also continues to work on a long-term project concerning the transmission of exempla by the Cistercians of Britain and Ireland c.1200. Prof. Birkett was in residence with us at Wesleyan for the Fall 2017 semester to collaborate on overlapping projects, and explore how to bring our Traveler’s Lab model of student-faculty research collaborations to Exeter University.
Kathryn Jasper (Associate Professor of History, Director European Studies, Illinois State University)
A specialization in Roman and medieval Mediterranean history expands to teaching interests spanning Western and Central Europe, North Africa, Byzantium, and the Middle East. Jasper’s courses emphasize engagement with diverse sources including monuments and art. In her research, Jasper focuses on archaeological excavations near Lake Bolsena, examining economic and trade implications. Her recent book, Bounded Wilderness: Land and Reform at the Hermitage of Fonte Avellana, ca. 1035-1072 (Cornell University Press, 2024), explores the role of land in medieval religious reform, offering insights into economic practices and ecclesiastical property.
Pavel Oleinikov (Associate Director, Quantitative Analysis Center (QAC), Wesleyan University)
Sean Perrone (Professor of History, Saint Anselm College)
Research has focused on the financial negotiations between the Castilian Crown and the Assembly of the Clergy in the sixteenth century. In recent years, Sean Perrone has been working on a project to map royal finances and the collection of ecclesiastical subsidies in the early 1500s. Right now he is working with history and computer science students to map monasteries that contributed to the ecclesiastical subsidies as well as monasteries along the Camino de Santiago in ArcGIS.
Silke Schwandt (Professor of Digital History at Bielefeld University)
Digitality is one of the greatest challenges of our time and affects all areas of society – not least science. This has a profound impact on scientific theories and methods, as well as on research practices and questions. In her research and teaching activities as Professor for Digital History at Bielefeld University, Silke Schwandt addresses these challenges on three levels: in the theorisation of digital history, in its methods and practices, as well as in its dissemination in academic teaching and to society. The conceptualisation of change under the conditions of digitality is therefore at the centre of her scientific work. Seizing and utilizing the possibilities of digital media for researching the relation of space and time is one of her research foci. A sustainable society needs the analytical reflection and scientific guidance of the digital transformation that humanities can provide. Silke Schwandt develops creative and innovative formats with a focus on Data Literacy as well as new digital publication formats. Current projects focus on designing digital workflows in the context of medieval English court records (The FLOW Project). Past projects have included also the development of VR applications for data exploration in history (See the virtual reality eTaRDiS Project).
Inactive Network Members
William Pinch (Professor of History, Wesleyan University) — — — Pinch’s work in the Traveler’s Lab focuses on the detailed journals and reports of Francis Buchanan (later Hamilton), surgeon and botanist, produced between 1807 and 1814 while in the service of the East India Company. Building on work done for his 1996 book, Peasants and Monks in British India (see here and here), Pinch and student Rachel Liu are producing GIS maps that aim to capture the myriad details of Buchanan’s travels through Bihar in north India—including the quality of roads, naming conventions, flora and fauna, built environment, notable encounters, and topography. In addition, they hope to produce a map of “sectarian influence” in south Bihar that focuses on the social roles of ascetics and holy men (and some women) and the ascetic networks and institutions that sustained them, about which Buchanan provided remarkably detailed information. This map will accompany a book chapter by Pinch for the Cambridge History of the Modern Indian Subcontinent (scheduled for 2022).
Jason L. Simms (Anthropologist and Academic Computing Manager at Lafayette College) — — — Simms is the Instructional Technologist for Lafayette College in Easton, PA. His interdisciplinary educational background and interests range from humanities to STEAM: he earned a B.A. in Classics and an M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Tennessee, and an M.P.H. in Environmental Health, a Ph.D. in Applied Anthropology, and a graduate certificate in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) from the University of South Florida. His broad interests within academic computing include data science and visualization, facilitating and energizing interdisciplinary collaboration on teaching and projects, geospatial projects, digital humanities, and more.