The Travelers Lab is a mechanism for bringing together faculty and students with overlapping interests in particular research topics and ideas, and in the analytical tools that can be used to pursue and develop those topics and ideas.
Interested? Here’s what we’re up to and who’s involved.
During the 2016-2017 academic year we were excited to fully launch the Wesleyan hub of the Lab, hosted by Dr. Pavel Oleinikov (Associate Director of Wesleyan’s Quantitative Analysis Center), which brought together students interested in working on Professor Shaw’s, Professor Torgerson’s, and Professor Franklin-Lyon (now of Emerson College)’s projects. It has been more popular than we expected. Students at any of the affiliated faculty’s institutions who are interested in joining us should contact any of these professors to learn about the multitude of ways they might get involved.
The lab expanded through our collaboration with Dr Helen Birkett of Exeter University, who had a memorable residency at Wesleyan in the fall of 2017, working with several students. She has remained a central member of the lab.
We also hope to continue collaborations with Dr. Jason L. Simms now of Lafayette College.
Excitingly, in the fall of 2018, a teaching-research collaboration was struck up with Professor Kathryn Jasper of Illinois State University, in which her students and some of the Lab’s existing projects and methods came together.
The next significant development was meeting Professor Sean Perrone of St Anselm College, whose work on sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain shows interesting overlap with our interests in mapping, religious institutions, and mobility. He joined the lab in the spring of 2019.
Most recently (fall 2020), we have consolidated our ambitions to be a general pre-contemporary history lab with the addition of Professor William Pinch of Wesleyan, whose specialty is early modern and nineteenth century India.
For more on these and other current members, please follow the links below.