Meet the Team

The vibrant Cultures of Knowledge community brings together experts from diverse academic and technical disciplines from throughout Europe:

Steering Committee

Pietro Corsi Peter Harrison Howard Hotson Neil Jefferies Rhodri Lewis

Noel Malcolm Richard Ovenden William Poole Michael Popham Richard Sharpe

The Steering Committee, comprising the Project Director, oversees our strategic direction and reviews progress

Collaborators

Kate Bennett Mark Greengrass Steffen Huber Brynley F. Roberts Christoph J. Scriba

Jackie Stedall Márton Szentpéteri Vladimír Urbánek Benjamin Wardhaugh

An international community of scholarly partners involved with specific research projects

IT Professionals

Sushila Burgess Erin Cooper Neil Jefferies

Monica Messaggi Kaya Michael Popham Matthew Wilcoxson

Robust techincal support for our union catalogue of correspondence from colleagues at Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Services (BDLSS)

Research Fellows, Students, and Editors

Philip Beeley Iva Lelková Kim McLean-Fiander

Anna Marie Roos Helen Watt Kelsey Jackson Williams

The scholarly and editorial community responsible for particular research projects, as well as editorial operations within the union catalogue

Alumni

Kateřina Horníčková

Leigh Penman

Former members of the Project, now departed for pastures new

Coordination, Administration, and Editorial Support

James Brown

Miranda Lewis

Day-to-day project management, administration, and editorial assistance

 

Steering Committee

Professor Pietro Corsi
History of Science, Linacre College, University of Oxford

A founding member of the Project, Pietro Corsi, Professor of the History of Science at Oxford, has abridged and translated into Italian Webster’s The Great Instauration (1975; Milan, 1980), and From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (1982; Bologna, 1984). His interests include the history of the life and earth sciences, the history of science as a discipline, and science and society in nineteenth-century Great Britain, France, and Italy. He has published on the history of neuroscience, on science and religion from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, and on Lamarck and Darwin and the responses to them. He is the author of several internet projects, including an online edition of Lamarck‘s theoretical works, manuscripts, and herbarium, with a prosopographic database of the 987 pupils attending his lectures, of Buffon, and on the history of geological surveys. His last book, Fossils and Reputations. A scientific correspondence: Pisa, Paris, London, 1853–1857 (Pisa, Pisa University Press, 2008) explores the still-unmapped world of geological and natural history networks of correspondences in nineteenth-century Europe.

Projects: Seminars

Back to Top

 

Professor Peter Harrison
Theology, Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford

Peter Harrison, Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion, has published monographs on ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (CUP, 1990) and The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (CUP, 1998), and The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (CUP, 2007). He has also published extensively in cultural and intellectual history, especially on early modern philosophical, scientific, and religious thought. He is a founding member of the International Society for Science and Religion and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities; in 2003 he was awarded a Centenary Medal for his contributions to Philosophy and Religion.

Projects: Seminars

Back to Top

 

Professor Howard Hotson, Project Director
History, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford

Howard Hotson, Professor of Early Modern Intellectual History, has published inter alia an intellectual biography of Comenius’s teacher, Johann Heinrich Alsted (OUP, 2000), and a survey of central European Reformed educational theory and practice (Commonplace learning: Ramism and its German ramifications, 1543–1630, OUP, 2007), both of which interrelate the histories of science, philosophy, religion, and education and ground them in concrete historical contexts. He is currently editing a survey of the correspondence network of Samuel Hartlib (d. 1662), completing a study of the international diaspora of Reformed intelligentsia during the Thirty Years War, and organising a series of workshops on seventeenth-century intellectual networks in the Czech, Polish, and Hungarian Academies of Science, which will culminate in an Oxford conference in 2010. From 2009 to 2012 he will be President of the International Society for Intellectual History.

Projects: Samuel Hartlib, Workshops, Conferences

Back to Top

 

Neil Jefferies, Technical Director
BDLSS, Bodleian Libraries

Full profile below.

Back to Top

 

Dr Rhodri Lewis
English, St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford

Rhodri Lewis has interests in literary and intellectual history from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. In addition to numerous shorter studies, he is the author of Language, Mind, and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (2007) and William Petty on the Order of Nature (2012). At the moment, he is at work on four projects. First, a monograph on Shakespeare’s relationship to early modern theories of apprehension, perception, and imagination, provisionally titled Shaping Fantasies. Second, editing (with Daniel Andersson and Sophie Weeks) volume 5 of the Oxford University Press edition of Francis Bacon’s complete works, which comprises the De sapientia veterum (1609) and Bacon’s early philosophical writings to about 1611. Third, editing (with Kate Bennett and William Poole) the correspondence of John Aubrey as one of the Cultures of Knowledge core projects. Fourth, a monograph on the changing significance of the ‘man of letters’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Projects: John Aubrey, Conferences

Back to Top

 

Dr Noel Malcolm
History, All Souls College, University of Oxford

Noel Malcolm has wide interests in early modern intellectual history. He has edited the complete correspondence of Thomas Hobbes (1994), and is preparing the English and Latin texts of Leviathan for the Clarendon Edition of Hobbes’s works (of which he is a general editor). He has also published (with Jacqueline Stedall) John Pell (1611–1685) and His Correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish: The Mental World of an Early Modern Mathematician (2005), as well as studies of figures such as Bodin, Mersenne, Comenius, Kircher, and Oldenburg. He is a Fellow of All Souls College, and a Fellow of the British Academy.

Projects: Conferences

Back to Top

 

Richard Ovenden
Associate Director, Bodleian Libraries

Richard Ovenden, Keeper of Special Collections and Associate Director for Information Technology, Bodleian Library, co-edited A Radical’s Books: The Library Catalogue of Samuel Jeake of Rye (1623–90) (Brewer, 1999), and contributed to Private Libraries in Renaissance England (1992–) and The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 2006). He has wide expertise in the field of collections and libraries, and is a fellow of St Hugh’s College.

Projects: Bodleian Catalogue, Infrastructure

Back to Top

 

Dr William Poole
English, New College, University of Oxford

William Poole has edited Francis Lodwick’s A Description of a Country Not Named (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2006), and has published a monograph on Milton and the Idea of the Fall (CUP, 2005). He works on seventeenth-century textual scholarship and intellectual history, and co-directed the AHRC-funded project Free-Thinking and Language-Planning in Late Seventeenth-Century England. He has published two-dozen articles on aspects of literary, scientific, and intellectual history, and has edited various linguistic, theological, and bibliographical manuscripts from the period.

Projects: John Aubrey, Conferences

Back to Top

 

Michael Popham
Oxford Digital Library, BDLSS, Bodleian Libraries

Full profile below.

Back to Top

 

Professor Richard Sharpe
History, Wadham College, University of Oxford

Richard Sharpe is Professor of Diplomatic at Oxford. His expertise lies in the study of documents and archives, and in his publications he has ranged widely between late antiquity and the eighteenth century. The role of antiquaries in preserving documents or texts that would otherwise have been lost has long interested him, and he has proved the value of approaching such evidence with an understanding both of the context in which antiquaries worked and of the materials they studied. Letters have long interested him as non-narrative documents with an immediate context and as posing challenges involving the vicissitudes affecting the survival of correspondence in what is inevitably a complex archival setting. The letters of antiquaries make a rewarding study in themselves as well as helping to understand how they found and used antiquarian evidence in their own studies. His involvement in Cultures of Knowledge is centred on the union catalogue of correspondence and in particular on the letters to and from the Welsh scientist, antiquary, and linguist Edward Lhwyd. Other current research projects are an edition of the charters of the Anglo-Norman kings William II and Henry I (1087–1135) and the study of the medieval libraries of Great Britain through a combination of surviving books and medieval library records. A full list of his publications is available here (pdf).

Projects: Bodleian Catalogue, Edward Lhwyd

Back to Top

 

Collaborators

Dr Kate Bennett
English, University of Oxford

Projects: John Aubrey

Back to Top

 

Professor Mark Greengrass
History, University of Sheffield

Mark Greengrass’s research interests concentrate on the history of Europe in the post-reformation period, with particular emphasis on the political and religious history of France and the intellectual history of Europe more generally. His interests in intellectual history are represented by the collaborative collection that he edited with M.P. Leslie and T. Raylor, Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication (Cambridge University Press, 1994). He also directed the Hartlib Papers Project which transcribed, edited, and published the unique manuscript collections of Samuel Hartlib, a seventeenth-century man of science, housed in Sheffield University Library. The project completed its work in 2002 when the second edition of the two CD-ROM set was published by HRiOnline. He now directs the British Academy John Foxe Project.

Projects: Samuel Hartlib

Back to Top

 

Dr Steffen Huber
Philosophy, Jagiellonian University, Cracow

Projects: Cracow Workshop

Back to Top

 

Dr Brynley F. Roberts
Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, University of Wales

Brynley F. Roberts was formerly Professor of Welsh at Swansea University (1978–85), and subsequently Librarian of the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth (1985–94). As the Sir John Rhŷs Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford (1973–74), he began to research Edward Lhwyd and his correspondence. He is the author of a number of articles on Edward Lhwyd, and with Dewi W. Evans he edited Archaeologia Britannica: Texts & Translations (Aberystywth, 2009).

Projects: Edward Lhwyd

Back to Top

 

Professor Christoph J. Scriba
History of Science, University of Hamburg

Christoph J. Scriba studied mathematics and sciences at the universities of Marburg and Giessen. He lectured at the universities of Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Toronto from 1957 to 1962. After a research period in Oxford he became assistant and Privatdozent at the University of Hamburg, full Professor for the History of Science and Technology at the Technical University of Berlin (1969–1975) and at the University of Hamburg until his retirement in 1995. Among his publications are a cultural history of geometry 5000 Jahre Geometrie (together with Peter Schreiber; Springer, 2000), Writing the History of Mathematics – its Historical Development (ed. together with J. W. Dauben; Birkhäuser, 2002), and two volumes of The Correspondence of John Wallis (together with Philip Beeley; OUP, since 2003).

Projects: John Wallis

Back to Top

 

Dr Jackie Stedall
Mathematical Institute, The Queen’s College, University of Oxford

Jacqueline Stedall works on early modern English mathematics. With Noel Malcolm she has published an intellectual biography of Pell, including a complete edition of his correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish. She has also published on Harriot, Pell, Brouncker, Wallis, and other seventeenth-century English mathematicians. Her current research is on the work of Thomas Harriot and on the development of algebra during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Projects: Infrastructure

Back to Top

 

Dr Márton Szentpéteri
Institute of Literature, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest

Márton Szentpéteri is a former Junior Fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS), and is currently an associate professor at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. His main interests lie in early modern intellectual and cultural history, and modern design culture. He is an author of the monograph Johann Heinrich Alsted and the Herborn Legacy in Transylvania (in Hungarian, 2008), and an editor of the Helikon: Revue de littérature générale et comparée, published in Budapest by the HAS.

Projects: Budapest Workshop

Back to Top

 

Dr Vladimír Urbánek
Institute of Philosophy, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague

Vladimír Urbánek is Research Fellow of the Institute of Philosophy, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. His research interests focus on early modern intellectual history, scholarly communication and networks, Protestant intellectuals exiled from the Czech lands, and the life and work of Jan Amos Comenius. He is currently working on Czech millenarian prophecies from the mid-seventeenth century. He is an author of a monograph Eschatology, Knowledge and Politics: On the Intellectual History of the Post-White-Mountain Bohemian Exiles (in Czech, 2008). He is an editor-in-chief of the Acta Comeniana: International Review of Comenius Studies and Early Modern Intellectual History, published in Prague.

Projects: Jan Amos Comenius, Workshops, Conferences

Back to Top

 

Dr Benjamin Wardhaugh
History, All Souls College, University of Oxford

Dr Benjamin Wardhaugh works on the uses and meanings of mathematics in the early modern period, including the status of mathematics and patterns of mathematical publication. He is involved with several forthcoming volumes of the Ashgate series of critical editions, Music Theory in Britain 1500–1700, and is the author of Music, Experiment and Mathematics in England, 1653–1705 (Ashgate, 2008).

Projects: Infrastructure, Scientific Correspondences Bibliography

Back to Top

 

IT Professionals

Sushila Burgess, Lead Developer
BDLSS, Bodleian Libraries

After completing an MPhil on the work of Simone de Beauvoir at the University of Reading, Sushila Burgess moved into IT and worked as a software developer, initially in the oil industry and then for several years in the administration of the University of Oxford. Since 2006 she has been working for the Bodleian Libraries, developing online catalogues of collections such as the Bodleian’s nineteenth-century Foreign Office Confidential Prints collection, and on a JISC-funded project digitising material from the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera.

Projects: Hartlib Database, Infrastructure

Back to Top

 

Erin Cooper, ITDS Manager
BDLSS, Bodleian Libraries

Projects: Infrastructure

Back to Top

 

 

 

 

Neil Jefferies, Technical Director
BDLSS, Bodleian Libraries

Projects: Infrastructure

Neil Jefferies (MA, MBA) is Research and Development Project Manager for the Bodleian Libraries, responsible for the development and delivery of new projects and services. He was involved with the initial setup of the Eprints and Fedora Repositories at Oxford and is now working on the implementation of a long-term digital archive platform. Alongside his commitments to Cultures of Knowledge, Neil is Technical Director of the IMPAcT project, Co-PI on the DataFlow project, and an invited contributor to the SharedCanvas project. He also represents the Bodleian on the JISC PALS (Publisher and Library Solutions) panel. Previously, he has worked in a broad range of computer-related fields ranging from chip design and parallel algorithm development for Nortel, writing anti-virus software for Dr Solomon’s, and developing corporate IT solutions and systems for several major blue-chips.

Back to Top

 

Monica Messaggi Kaya, Designer
BDLSS, Bodleian Libraries

Monica Messagi Kaya is a software engineer at the University of Oxford; she has a background in multimedia development with experience in creating training materials (CBTs, e-learning content, CMS/LMS), web development, and design. She has a BSc in computer science, and is currently completing her MSc in Software Engineering at the University of Oxford. Currently, Monica is working on various front end designs for projects within Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Services (BDLSS).

Projects: Infrastructure

Back to Top

 

Michael Popham
Oxford Digital Library, BDLSS, Bodleian Libraries

Projects: Bodleian Catalogue

Back to Top

 

 

 

 

Matthew Wilcoxson, Front End Developer
BDLSS, Bodleian Libraries

Matthew Wilcoxson is a software engineer working on various projects within the Bodleian Libraries. Before moving to Oxford he worked as a software engineer at the company Softease located on the edge of the Peak District but then made the move south to the company Research Machines; both companies produce web- and desktop-based software mainly for use within UK schools. He obtained a BSc in Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence at the University of Essex, and is currently studying towards a BSc in Astrophysics with the Open University. He hopes one day to fly to Mars.

Projects: Infrastructure

Back to Top

 

Research Fellows, Students, and Editors

Dr Philip Beeley, Research Fellow
History, Linacre College, University of Oxford

Philip Beeley has written extensively on early modern philosophy and the history of science, including a monograph on the young Leibniz, Kontinuität und Mechanismus (1996). He was for many years editor of Leibniz’s philosophical writings and correspondence for the Berlin Academy Edition, and is co-editor of the multi-volume Correspondence of John Wallis (OUP, 2003–). Before joining the Project, Philip worked as a researcher on the Oxford-based Wallis Project, producing editions of Wallis’s non-mathematical works, including his Treatise of Logick.

Projects: John Wallis

Back to Top

 

Iva Lelková, Postdoctoral Fellow
Institute of Philosophy, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague

Iva Lelková graduated in history and philosophy at Palacký University in Olomouc. She took part in the Mapping the Republic of Letters project at Stanford University as a Fulbright grantee, where she worked on the correspondence of Athanasius Kircher. She is currently in the final phases of writing up her doctoral dissertation on Kircher’s influence on the Czech Lands. She is interested in the history of ideas, the history of science, and the representation of science in early modern literature (for example, the Philosophical Thoughts of Cyrano de Bergerac). She is now working on the correspondence of Jan Amos Comenius and has plans to explore the relationship between Catholic and Protestant intellectual networks in the early modern period.

Projects: Jan Amos Comenius

Back to Top

 

Dr Kim McLean-Fiander, Editor
History Faculty, University of Oxford

Kim McLean-Fiander’s scholarship focuses on early modern women, their intellectual networks, and how they wrote their lives into the paratextual interstices of their works. Alongside her academic research, she has for several years worked for the Bodleian Libraries and as a freelance editor. During her 2009 internship with the Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, she labelled and rehoused a wide range of fourteenth- to nineteenth-century documents from the Ferrers Family Papers and edited the associated online finding aid. She has a passion for rare books and manuscripts as social and material artefacts, and is currently interested in the development of digitization projects which will improve scholarly access to these resources while ensuring their ongoing preservation and conservation.

Projects: Bodleian Catalogue, John Wallis, Infrastructure

Back to Top

 

Dr Anna Marie Roos, Research Fellow
History Faculty, University of Oxford

Before serving as the Lister Research Fellow for Cultures of Knowledge, Anna Marie Roos was an associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota. Her third monograph, an intellectual biography of Martin Lister, will be published by Brill in August 2011. Entitled Web of Nature: Martin Lister (1639–1712), the First Arachnologist, the book has received funding from the British Academy, the Royal Society, and the National Science Foundation. She is currently researching Lister’s ‘chymical’ experiments with antimony which influenced the work of Sir Isaac Newton.

Projects: Martin Lister

Back to Top

 

Helen Watt, Editorial Assistant
Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, University of Wales

Helen Watt worked on the Welsh Manorial Records Database Project run by the National Library of Wales with the Historical Manuscripts Commission (1993-6), on three phases of a project run by the Universities of Cambridge, Bangor, and York respectively to research details of records of English and Welsh lay and clerical taxation held in The National Archives, Kew (1999-2005, 2006-2009), and on the ‘Completing the Calendar of Patent Rolls, Elizabeth’ Project run by the University of Reading (2005-6). Her publications include Welsh Manors and their Records (Aberystwyth, 2000) and articles on taxation in England and Wales in two collections of essays published in 2008. She is currently joint-editing a body of letters written mostly by late eighteenth-century Royal Navy ordinary seamen, to be published by the Navy Records Society.

Projects: Edward Lhwyd

Back to Top

 

Kelsey Jackson Williams, Doctoral Student
English, Balliol College, University of Oxford

Kelsey Jackson Williams is a graduate of Oklahoma State University and holds a Masters from the University of Oxford. His doctoral thesis, entitled ‘The Virtuoso: John Aubrey and the Royal Society’, will offer the first systematic investigation of Aubrey’s relationship with the Royal Society, both as an institution and as a space for intellectual exchange amongst individual members. As well as Aubrey, his research interests include early modern archaeology and antiquarianism, the Republic of Letters, the Scottish Renaissance, and Neo-Latin poetry.

Projects: John Aubrey

Back to Top

 

Alumni

Dr Kateřina Horníčková, Postdoctoral Fellow
Institute of Philosophy, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague

Kateřina Horníčková graduated from art history and classical archaeology at Charles University, Prague, and finished her doctorate in Medieval Studies at Central European University, Budapest. Lately, she has worked on visual culture amidst the confessional divide of the fifteenth to early seventeenth centuries in the Bohemian lands, with a specific focus on their political and intellectual contexts (‘Memory, Politics and Holy Relics: Catholic Tactics amidst the Hussite Reformation’, in Materializing Memory: Archaeological Material Culture and the Semantics of the Past [submitted to BAR International series, Archaeopress: Oxford, forthcoming 2009]). She is the curator of the groundbreaking exhibition ‘Art of the Bohemian Reformation’ that opens in Prague Castle in December 2009.

Projects: Jan Amos Comenius

Back to Top

 

Dr Leigh Penman, Postdoctoral Fellow
History Faculty, University of Oxford

Leigh Penman graduated with degrees in arts and law from the University of Melbourne. His doctoral thesis, concerning millenarian thought in early seventeenth-century Germany, was undertaken at Melbourne in association with the former Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte in Göttingen. He is the author of the forthcoming monograph Unanticipated Millenniums: The Lutheran Experience of Chiliastic Thought, 1600–1630 (Springer), as well as more than a dozen articles on aspects of early modern history. His current research interests encompass imagined and virtual communities in seventeenth-century Europe, the network surrounding the Lusatian philosopher Jacob Böhme (d.1624), and the instrumentalisation of early modern historical events in modern popular and political culture.

Projects: Samuel Hartlib

Back to Top

 

Coordination and Administrative Support

Dr James Brown, Project Coordinator
History Faculty, University of Oxford

James Brown has research interests in the social, economic, and cultural history of seventeenth-century England. His doctoral thesis, entitled ‘The Landscape of Drink: Inns, Taverns, and Alehouses in Early Modern Southampton’, was confirmed at the University of Warwick in 2008. He has articles forthcoming on public houses as sites of surveillance and on the meaning and manufacture of beer in pre-industrial urban communities, and is preparing the English installment of Public Drinking in the Early Modern World, a multi-volume edition of early modern tavern sources to be published by Pickering and Chatto in 2011. He has a Summer Fellowship at McGill University as part of the Making Publics Project, and has facilitated two Leverhulme Trust International Networks: Social Sites – Öffentliche Räume – Lieux d’échanges, 1300–1800 (University of Warwick) and The Documentation of Individual Identity: Historical and Comparative Perspectives since 1500 (University of Oxford).

Back to Top

 

Miranda Lewis, Editor and Administrator
History Faculty, University of Oxford

Miranda Lewis is a graduate of the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, where she completed her MA thesis on sixteenth-century French portraiture. She has worked as assistant editor for The Burlington Magazine, and as freelance editor or copywriter for a wide variety of academic institutions and publications, including the Friends of the British Library Magzine, the British Museum Magazine, and the London Library Magazine, for which she is currently on the Editorial Advisory Board.

Projects: Bodleian Catalogue, Record of the Week

Back to Top