The Sferisti
Project Directors
Carrie Beneš, Co-Project Director for Spatial Analysis, is a cultural historian with extensive experience in spatial history whose research focuses on landscape and urban identity in late medieval Italy. She is Professor of Medieval & Renaissance History at New College of Florida.
Laura Ingallinella, Co-Project Director for Editorial Practice, is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Toronto. She is a scholar of late medieval and Renaissance Italian literature who specializes in the transregional and cross-linguistic exchanges characteristic of merchant culture.
Amanda Madden, Co-Project Director for Visualization, is Assistant Professor of History and Director of Geospatial History in the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. She has led or co-led several digital spatial history projects and her current research focuses on violence and space in early modern Italy. As Co-Project Director for Visualization (.05FTE both years), she will oversee web development, design, and hosting for our digital edition.
Laura Morreale, Co-Project Director for Project Management, is an independent scholar based in Washington, D.C. whose research explores questions of medieval Italian history and historiography using digital methods. She has served as project director or Co-PI on over a dozen digital medieval studies projects and directs a series on Digital Medieval Studies for ARC Humanities Press.
Regular Contributors
Jason Heppler is a historian and senior web developer at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. He has over ten years of experience designing, developing, and leading digital history projects, while his scholarship focuses on environmental, political, and cultural histories of the 19th- and 20th-century North American West and Great Plains.
Caterina Agostini is a scholar of Italian studies and book history specializing in the history of science in the Renaissance and early modern period. She is Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship, the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values, and the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society, University of Notre Dame, as well as Co-Chair of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) Outreach Community Group.
Elena Brizio is a social and political historian whose research focuses on Tuscany in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She teaches History at Georgetown University Villa Le Balze in Fiesole.
Monica Keane is Digital Collections & Metadata Coordinator at San Jose State University. She is a scholar of comparative literature, especially late medieval Italian (Dante and Boccaccio) with extensive experience in digital projects and digital archiving.
Occasional Contributors
Winston Black, a historian of medicine in medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, is Gatto Chair of Christian Studies at St. Francis Xavier University (Nova Scotia).
Stephanie Lahey is a SSHRC-funded postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies and Old Books New Sciences lab. Her research focuses on medieval codicology and palaeography, with an emphasis on quantitative and scientifically informed approaches to the materiality of books before print.
Michael Ryan, Associate Professor of History at the University of New Mexico, studies the intersection of magic, science, and religion in the premodern world, especially in Spain and Italy.
Matthew Westerby, an art historian of medieval and Renaissance Europe with special expertise in manuscripts and the digital humanities, is Digital Research Officer at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Ciara McIlvenny is an undergraduate student concentrating in History at New College of Florida, who first encountered La sfera in Professor Beneš's class Early Modern Europe: The World in Maps. She serves as the Sfera Project's social media manager.
...but we are proud that the La Sfera Project has so far included over 130 people, from senior faculty to undergraduates, librarians and programmers to literary scholars and historians, art historians to digital humanists and historians of science. This project began with crowdsourcing, as a way for people to connect and have fun, and we hope it will continue to do so. To see the lists of team members for the first two La Sfera Challenges, click here.