Researcher: Shahzad Bashir

This interactive, open-access publication explores Islam as an aspect of global history, as phenomenon and as discourse — observed in the built environment, material objects, paintings, linguistic traces, narratives, and social situations. It decenters Islam from a geographical identification with the Middle East, an articulation through men’s authority alone, and the assumption that premodern expressions are more authentically Islamic than modern ones.

Researcher: Massimo Riva

This digital publication explores popular forms of entertainment used in the 18th and 19th centuries to transport viewers to a new world, foreshadowing present-day virtual, augmented, and extended reality experiences (VR, AR, XR). “Shadow Plays” examines themes of virtual travel, social surveillance, and utopian imagination through six case histories and eight interactive simulations.

Researcher: Evelyn Lincoln

This digital humanities research site explores the networks of producers (printers, publishers, patrons, artists, and authors) of early modern books printed in, or about, Rome. The site also hosts documents on the material culture of early modern Roman print shops, including the papers of Francesca Consagra relating to her research on the de Rossi family printing and publishing dynasty.

Researcher: Tara Nummedal

This site brings to life in digital form an enigmatic 17th-century text, Michael Maier’s alchemical emblem book Atalanta fugiens (1618), which reinterprets Ovid’s legend of Atalanta as an alchemical allegory in a series of fifty emblems, each of which contains text, image, and a musical score for three voices. Furnace and Fugue allows readers to hear, see, manipulate, and investigate Atalanta fugiens in ways that were simply impossible to realize in full before now.

Researcher: Massimo Riva

This XML electronic edition of Boccaccio’s Decameron and other works, and the accompanying hypermedia archive of contextual materials, are conceived as an encyclopedic gateway into late Medieval life and culture. The guiding question of this project is how contemporary informational technology can facilitate and enhance the complex cognitive and learning activities involved in reading a late medieval literary text like the Decameron.

Researcher: Massimo Riva

The Progetto Pico (Pico Project), a partnership between Brown University and the University of Bologna, began as a collaborative online annotated edition of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on Human Dignity (1486), presented here in its first printed edition (Bologna, 1496). It now includes Pico’s Conclusiones Nongentae Disputandae (1486), or 900 Theses, an extraordinary attempt at a synthesis and “reconciliation” of all known philosophical and theological ideas.