Research interests
Digital Humanities
I met by chance Dr. David Joseph Wrisley in 2019. He came to the Louvre Abu Dhabi to present the Winter Institute in Digital Humanities, which he co-created. He, and other scholars I had the chance to meet since then, introduced me to a whole new world of methodologies and possibilities.
Today, I tend to use digital methods and computational analysis to broaden the research possibilities and I am particularly keen on working with distant reading and viewing, handwritten text recognition (HTR), stylometry, neural networks, image analysis and geographic information systems (GIS).
I have published several articles in renowned journals and my co-authored book (with Dr. David J. Wrisley), “Machine Learning and Medieval Manuscripts: Big Data, Scribes, and the “Paris Bible.” is currently under contract with Arc Humanities Press.
My dissertation, a recovery project to identify female scribes and their production, includes quantitative and qualitative analysis combinew with computational approaches.
Medieval Manuscripts
My research interests include primarily the qualitative and quantitative study of manuscripts from a textual, codicological and visual point of view, as well as questions of attribution and copy.
My master’s thesis was a monograph study of a single manuscript held in the collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Recently, I published the collection of medieval manuscripts from the Louvre Abu Dhabi collection and I participated in the acquisition of several new manuscripts.
My main research projects so far have focused on manuscripts, studying the abbreviations and special letter forms as markers of scribal practices (“Paris Bible Project”), or the illuminations, either from a conservation and technical perspective (“Understanding Medieval Manuscripts Gilding Techniques”) or in relation to the text, using feature & object detection, analysis of colours, intensity, etc. to try to find patterns in corpora of similar manuscripts (“Deep Illumination”).
Cultural and Intellectual Exchanges, Global History
I am also an interdisciplinary researcher interested in questions of cultural and intellectual exchange, particularly around the Mediterranean sea. It can concern the mobility of texts but also travels and exchanges of techniques and scientific knowledge or the appearance of similar cultural phenomena and practices in different cultures and civilizations.
As part of the Louvre Abu Dhabi scientific team, I worked on several projects, including the exhibition Furusiyya, the Art of Chivalry between East and West for which I was Scientific Referent. It confronted the artistic manifestations of the life of this social group, emphasizing the anthropological dimension and the economic, social and cultural contexts.
I participated in the development of the Permanent Galleries of the museum, particularly the wing dedicated to the Middle Ages, addressing the thematics of religions (including the symbolism of light in Christianism, Buddhism and Islam, the symbols of the faith or the practice of pilgrimage), the Asian Trade Routes and the exchanges around the Mediterranean sea (from the Silk Roads and commercial routes of frankincense, ivory ceramics, to the intellectual, scientific and political exchanges). I also wrote pedagogical content and developed educational tools for Louvre Abu Dhabi, such as the Sacred Texts Flipbooks which explain and compare manuscripts from different religions and cultures (Bible, Pentateuch, Qur’an, Sutra) or the Coinage wall.
I am also developing a spatial humanities project titled “Mapping Pilgrimages Roads” which is based on a unique manuscript in the Louvre Abu Dhabi collection.
Gender Studies
My disseration looks at women as scribes and copyists in the long Middle Ages (until 1600) and their impact on the economy of manuscript production, both in scriptoria and in urban workshops. I recovered the production of more than a thousand women (more to come) and aim to make this dataset available to the larger scholarly community before the end of my PhD.
In my free time
I like to discover and experience as much as I can. I practice sports almost daily, from boxing and running to lifting weights and climbing. I used to be one of the co-captains of Yale’s Graduate Rugby Team.
I also love to solo travel and go hiking, horse-riding, canoeing or any other outdoor (and sometimes slightly dangerous) activity.
Outside of universities, museums and libraries, I am also a creator of non-award-winning board games, a diver, a desert and off-road driver, and my friends’ outdoor activity organizer.