Medieval Manuscripts

At the heart of my research lie medieval manuscripts, which I study from codicological, textual, and visual perspectives. I am especially interested in scribal practices, attribution, and copy, as well as the relationship between text and image.

My earliest master’s research, a monograph on a single manuscript at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, sparked a long-term interest in codicology. Since then, I have published the catalogue of medieval manuscripts in the Louvre Abu Dhabi collection and contributed to new acquisitions.

I have also lead and contributed to several projects focusing on manuscripts:

Gender Studies

My dissertation focuses on women as scribes and copyists in the long Middle Ages (before 1600) and their role in the economy of manuscript production, both in monastic scriptoria and urban workshops.

So far, I have identified more than a thousand female scribes and am building a large open dataset to make this material accessible to the wider scholarly community. My approach combines traditional codicology with computational methods to quantify, map, and contextualize women’s contributions, challenging long-standing assumptions about literacy, authorship, and cultural production.

Digital Humanities

My entry into the digital humanities was almost accidental. In 2019, while working at the Louvre Abu Dhabi, I met Dr. David Joseph Wrisley, who introduced me to the Winter Institute in Digital Humanities, which he co-created. That encounter opened an entirely new world of methodologies and possibilities.

Today, I use computational methods to expand the study of manuscripts and cultural history. My work includes textual analysis (distant reading, handwritten text recognition, stylometry), visual analysis (neural networks, image processing, feature detection), and spatial approaches (GIS, mapping). These tools allow me to ask questions at scale that were once impossible to pursue.

I have published in several peer-reviewed journals, and my co-authored book with Dr. Wrisley, Medieval Manuscripts and the Computational Humanities : Big Data, Scribes, and the “Paris Bible,” is under contract with Arc Humanities Press. My dissertation, a large-scale recovery project on female scribes, relies on both qualitative and quantitative analysis, combined with computational approaches.

Cultural and Intellectual Exchanges, Global History

I am also an interdisciplinary researcher deeply interested in cultural and intellectual exchange across the Mediterranean world, from the circulation of texts and ideas to the mobility of techniques, trade, and artistic practices.

As part of the Louvre Abu Dhabi scientific team, I contributed to both the Permanent Galleries and major exhibitions, including Furusiyya: The Art of Chivalry between East and West, where I served as Scientific Referent. These projects explored themes such as pilgrimage, religious expression across cultures, trade routes, and scientific exchange.

Beyond exhibitions, I also developed educational tools—including the Sacred Texts Flipbooks, which present and compare manuscripts from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. Another project, currently on pause, Mapping Pilgrimage Roads, draws on a unique manuscript from the Louvre Abu Dhabi collection to explore mobility, devotion, and spatial history.

In my free time

Outside research, I love to explore and stay active. I practice sports almost daily—from boxing, running, and weightlifting to climbing—and I once co-captained Yale’s Graduate Rugby Team. I also travel solo, hike, ride horses, and canoe, always looking for new outdoor challenges.

I am a diver, a desert and off-road driver, and a creator of (non-award-winning!) board games. Most importantly, I am my friends’ go-to organizer for outdoor adventures.