About SIMS

Hannah Bradley serves as the Editorial Assistant for the SIMS journal, Manuscript Studies. She is currently a PhD student in the Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies department at Penn. She holds a BA in Germanics with research distinction from The Ohio State University with a minor in creative writing, as well as a MA in German Studies from University of Washington. Hannah’s primary research interests are contemporary literature, ecocriticism, and translation.  

Jessie Dummer has worked as Digitization Project Coordinator at Penn Libraries since 2010, first for the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image and then for the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts and the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies since 2013. She has managed mass digitization projects from image capture to online display. She was an integral part of the team that launched OPenn in 2015 and continues to manage quality control of images and metadata added to OPenn, including those from grant-funded projects like Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis and Manuscripts of the Muslim World. She is also responsible for managing the ingest of digital assets of legacy projects into Penn Libraries’ digital repository. Jessie holds a Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science from Drexel University and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania.

Laura Newman Eckstein is the Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica Curator of Digital Humanities at Penn Libraries. Laura is also currently a PhD candidate in the Penn history department. Her studies focus on Jews in the early Atlantic world (17th-19th centuries) with specific interests in trade networks, material culture, and digital humanities methodologies. Prior to her doctoral studies, Laura worked as the Judaica Digital Humanities Coordinator at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. Laura holds a bachelor’s degree with the highest honors in religion from Haverford College.

Doug Emery oversees data operations for SIMS and provides programming, supervisory, and consultative support for most of SIMS’s digital projects, including the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts and Penn Libraries’ OPenn website. He is the architect and manager of OPenn, a site that hosts full-resolution images of 6,500 books and manuscripts from thirty-five collections and repository in the U.S. and England, including Penn Libraries’ medieval and renaissance manuscripts and the Lawrence J. Schoenberg collection of manuscripts.

Doug has been working in the technology field since 1998 and on cultural heritage digital projects since 2005, when he began working as data manager for the Archimedes Palimpsest project. Since 2005, he has served at data manager for the multispectral imaging projects of the Syriac Galen Palimpsest, the Livingstone Diaries, the 1507 Waldseemüller Map, and the Sinai Palimpsests, architecting those projects’ digital workflows and datasets. He managed the data for the Walters Art Museum’s manuscript digitization projects and authored its Digital Walters website, prior to his joining Penn Libraries in 2013.

Doug’s educational background is in religious studies, English and American literature, and languages and literature of the Ancient Near East.

Mitch Fraas is Curator, Special Collections at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. He holds doctoral and master’s degrees in history from Duke University and earned his bachelor’s degree at Boston College. His doctoral dissertation examined the legal culture of British India in the 17th and 18th centuries. He has been a fellow of the Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History at the University of Wisconsin. In addition to the history of law and imperialism, he is especially interested in the history of printing and the book and in the digital humanities, as well as the future of scholarly publishing and copyright.

Nicholas Herman is the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Curator at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies and Medieval Studies Librarian at Penn Libraries. His teaching and research focus on manuscript illumination and its intersection with other media in fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century Europe.  

Nicholas received his doctorate in 2014 from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, with a dissertation focusing on the French Renaissance court painter, Jean Bourdichon. Prior to arriving at Penn in 2016, Nick has held fellowships at the Université de Montreal, the Courtauld Institute of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. From 2007 to 2010, he worked in the department of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. He has contributed to numerous catalog and exhibition projects in Europe and North America, and has published articles in Word and Image, Burlington Magazine, Journal of the History of Collections, Manuscripta, and Gesta. His books include Le livre enluminé, entre représentation et illusion (2018), Making the Renaissance Manuscript: Discoveries from Philadelphia Libraries (2020), and, co-written with Anne-Marie Eze, Bourdichon’s Boston Hours (2021). In Spring 2020 he was Craig Hugh Smyth Fellow at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti.

As a manuscripts cataloging librarian, Amey Hutchins describes manuscripts from the ninth to the nineteenth century for Penn’s online catalog and provides metadata for other SIMS projects, with the goal of making the manuscripts visible to a wide audience. She also is a member of the teaching team for the SIMS summer course in manuscripts skills for graduate students. Amey has an A.M. degree in Classical Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.L.I.S. degree from Drexel University.

Jajwalya “Jaj” Karajgikar (she/her) is the Applied Data Science Librarian for the UPenn community.

With extensive experience in data storytelling, natural language processing, computational social sciences, data visualization, network analysis, and knowledge mining (text/data/etc), Jaj engages with researchers across the disciplines interested in employing these techniques. She founded the AI Literacy Interest Group, hosts Carpentry workshops, collaborating on digital scholarship projects, working with the graduate center and other campus partners to establish foundational programming in research computing, data literacy, and data ethics.

Her research interests and adventures range from multilingual manuscripts, Asian art and culture, games-based learning, media studies, critical making to Digital Humanities and Critical Artificial Intelligence.

She has an MS in Computational Sciences from George Mason University and is a Post-Baccalaureate student at the University of Pennsylvania.

As Curator of Digital Humanities at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, Dot Porter participates in a wide-ranging digital humanities research and development team within the context of a special collections department. Dot’s projects focus on the digitization and visualization of medieval manuscripts.  

Dot holds Master’s degrees in Medieval Studies and Library Science and started her career working on image-based digital editions of medieval manuscripts. She has worked on a variety of digital humanities projects over a decade-long career, focusing on materials as diverse as ancient texts and Russian religious folklore, providing both technical support and scholarly expertise. From 2010 until March 2013, she was the Associate Director for Digital Library Content and Services at the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries, where she led in planning and implementing new services to support librarians and faculty in the creation of digital projects. She has also worked for the Digital Humanities Observatory at the Royal Irish Academy, and the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities at the University of Kentucky.

Sean Quimby leads a staff of 50 curators, archivists, librarians and researchers and oversees special collections that comprise 300,000 printed books and nearly ten million pieces of manuscript material within the University’s seven million-volume library system.  

He came to the Penn Libraries from Columbia University, where he was Director of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library. At Columbia, he worked to acquire, preserve and activate media-rich archives, such as those of countercultural icon and free-form radio host Bob Fass, Dance Theater of Harlem founder Arthur Mitchell, and playwright Tony Kushner. An experienced fund-raiser, he has led numerous projects funded by private donations as well as grant-giving bodies like the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Ford Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities.  

Quimby began his career at Stanford, where he oversaw the papers of polymath and technological utopian Buckminster Fuller. Between 2006 and 2014, he was the Senior Director of Special Collections at Syracuse University, where, among other things, he coordinated an international digital initiative on modernist architect Marcel Breuer. He received his training in the history of technology as a Hagley Fellow at the University of Delaware (M.A., 2000) and in library and information science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (M.L.I.S., 2006).

Lynn Ransom joined Penn Libraries in February 2008 as the Project Manager for the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts and is a founding member of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. Lynn holds a B.A. in art history from the University of the South and an M.A. and Ph.D. in medieval art history, with an emphasis on manuscript illumination from the University of Texas at Austin.  

Before coming to Penn, Lynn held positions in the manuscript collections at the Free Library of Philadelphia and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD. She also served as a researcher at the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University. She has published on manuscript illumination of the 13th and 16th centuries. Her current research interests involve the provenance of medieval manuscripts and the history of international manuscript cataloging efforts in the early 20th century.  

Lynn has recently overseen the NEH-funded redevelopment of the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts, as an open-access, user-maintained finding aid for the world’s pre-modern manuscripts. She is the project director of the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts.

Emma began working on the Schoenberg Database in 2011, first as a researcher creating new data and now as the project coordinator, where she approves all new records, manages the internal SDBM authority files, produces instructional content, and helps people use and contribute to the database. On September 1, 2020, she became the Project Manager for the IMLS-funded redevelopment of Digital Scriptorium 2.0.  She holds a MS in Library and Information Studies from Florida State University and a BA in Religion from the New College of Florida.

During his time as a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, Jonah served as editorial assistant for Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. Prior to being awarded a PhD at Penn in 2024, he obtained an M.A. in English Literature from Fordham University (2018) and his B.A. in Creative Writing and Religious Studies from the Macaulay Honors College at CUNY Hunter College (2016). His research focuses on both the history and representation of popular rebellion and dissent in the late-medieval and early modern periods (c. 1381-1642). In pursuit of such interests, his work engages with English chronicle writing, pastoral poetry, and the politics and poetics of early modern drama. Jonah served as co-coordinator for the Premodern Studies Working Group (formerly Med/Ren) from 2021 to 2022.

Tim completed a Post-Bacc and an MA in the History of Art at Penn. He is currently a PhD student at Harvard University.

Aylin is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania and the editorial assistant of Manuscript Studies, the journal of the Schoenberg Institute. Having received an MA in English from Ohio State (2016) and a BA&Sc. in Environment from McGill (2014), Aylin is currently working on poetry and scientific writing in the late medieval west. For more information, visit aylinmalcolm.com.

Dennis worked with the Lawrence J. Schoenberg collection of manuscripts since 2006. As a librarian and web site developer he helped create the original online versions of the manuscripts and developed the first online version of the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts. He has also created online exhibitions and catalogs that feature the Schoenberg collection. His more recent responsibilities include designing and maintaining the SIMS website, maintaining the SIMS YouTube channel and editing videos that appear there, and developing touch screen applications and online presentations for the SIMS exhibits here at the Penn Library.

As founding Director of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, Will orchestrated its integration with Penn’s broad primary-source holdings and guides the programs to support scholarship in the many disciplines that draw on the Libraries’ rare and unique materials. A specialist in the fields of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman manuscripts, Will came to Penn in 2012 from The Walters Art Museum where he had been Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books since 1997. He then served as the inaugural John T. Maltsberger III ’55 Associate University Librarian for Special Collections at Princeton University Library.

During his time at Penn, Patrick was principally involved with the development and testing of VCEditor, an innovative, open-access collation modelling and visualization tool.

Kelly holds a PhD in Arabic from Penn, and spent 5 years teaching Arabic after graduation. She has returned to Philadelphia and joined Manuscripts of the Muslim World–a grant-funded project to catalog and digitize the Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish collections at Penn, the Free Library of Philadelphia, other area institutions and Columbia University–as Project Cataloger.

During her time as the inaugural SIMS Undergraduate Outreach Intern, Aili organized themed manuscript displays for a variety of Penn’s clubs, and also assisted SIMS curators with various projects and displays.

During her time at Penn, Cosette Bruhns Alonso held the position of Contemporary Publishing Fellow. In this role, she spearheaded a pilot collaboration between the Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship and the University of Pennsylvania Press to design and develop digital publications through innovative uses of multimodal and interactive digital enhancements. 

Cosette received her PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Chicago, and completed her undergraduate degree in Philosophy at the New School. Her primary area of research and teaching is in 13th-16th century Italian art and literature with a focus on visual culture, manuscript studies, the representation of race and gender, and intersections between literature, media, and technology. Prior to joining Penn, Cosette held the position of Diversity in Digital Publishing & Italian Studies Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University, where she facilitated the NEH Institute on Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, Born-Digital Scholarly Publishing: Resources and Roadmaps. She also supported the editorial and digital development of faculty publications and curated an exhibition in Brown University’s Rockefeller Library on Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron and COVID-era viral art. She is the Editorial Assistant for Dante Studies.

Alberto Campagnolo, trained as a book conservator at the European Course for Conservators/Restorers of Book Materials (1998-2001) in Spoleto, Italy and has worked in that capacity in various institutions, amongst which the National Museum Wales, Palace Green Library at Durham University, Guildhall Library London, London Metropolitan Archives, St. Catherine’s Monastery (Egypt), and the Vatican Library. He studied Conservation of Library and Archive Materials (2001-2006) at Ca’ Foscari University Venice, Italy and then read for an MA in Digital Culture and Technology (2007-2009) at King’s College London. He pursued a PhD (2010-2015) on an automated visualization of historical bookbinding structures at the Ligatus Research Centre (University of the Arts, London). He was a CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Medieval Studies (2016-2018) at the Library of Congress (Washington, DC), and is now adjunct professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Udine, Italy.

Since 2013, Alberto has been collaborating with Dot Porter on VisColl, a modelling and visualization tool for the gathering structure of books in codex format.

After four decades as a designer of scholarly books, Barbara Williams Ellertson is now an independent researcher in the history of printing as portrayed in Renaissance art. She is currently the co-PI (along with SIMS curator Nicholas Herman) on the BASIRA (Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art) redevelopment project, which has been funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. This current work is a return to early interests: she earned a B.A. from Duke University with majors in history and religion. BW&A Books, the studio she founded in 1988 continues to provide services to a wide range of publishing clients. Two design projects for Cornell University Press on manuscript studies helped inspire Barbara’s interest in the BASIRA Project: Introduction to Manuscript Studies by Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Cornell, 2007; and Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches, by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, et al., Cornell, 2012.

Shreve Simpson is an independent scholar of Islamic art, and has published, taught and lectured widely on medieval and early modern Islamic art in general and the arts of the book (especially Persian illustrated manuscripts) in particular. Her professional career has included administrative and curatorial positions at the National Gallery of Art; Freer/Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution; and Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, as well as numerous visiting professorships throughout the United States. Most recently, she served as Guest Curator at the Princeton University Art Museum, and as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, Department of the History of Art (2012-2019). For the past two summers she has taught an intensive course on Islamic manuscripts at the Free Library of Philadelphia, under the auspices of the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School. She also serves as part of the advisory group for the Manuscripts of the Muslim World digitization project, based at Penn.

Zofia Załęska is a PhD Candidate at the University of Warsaw. She has been awarded a prestigious Fulbright/IIE Visiting Student Researcher fellowship to be in residence at SIMS for a six-month period, from February to July 2023. Her research concerns the iconography of dance, especially as it appears and is used in books of hours.