Organisers

Elena Pierazzo, University of Tours, elena.pierazzo@univ-tours.fr, is Professor of Digital Humanities at the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance, where she directs the master in Digital Humanities. She has a PhD in Italian Philology. Her specialisms are Italian Renaissance texts, digital editions of early modern and modern draft manuscripts, digital editing, and text encoding. She has been the Chair of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and involved in the TEI user community, with a special interest in modern and medieval manuscripts. She is the Principal Investigator of the PRIMA ERC project 'Manuscripts in the Age of Print' (Grant number 101142242)

Franco Tomasi is Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Padova (franco.tomasi@unipd.it). He has a PhD in Italian Literature. His research focuses mainly on the Italian Renaissance, with particular attention to lyric poetry and theoretical reflection on the genre, epic-chivalric poetry (Ariosto and Tasso), Italian poets exiled in France at the court of the Valois, and Sienese poetry. 

Dominique Stutzmann (dominique.stutzmann@irht.cnrs.fr) is a Senior Researcher at the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research) and Honorary Professor at the Humboldt‑Universität zu Berlin. He is an archivist-palaeographer (2002), earned a doctorate in history (2009), and achieved the habilitation in 2021. His research focuses on medieval written culture and the evolution of scripts (palaeography, mainly 12th-15th century and French area) and the rise of Vernacular literature. He co-organised the “CLaMM (Classification of Latin Medieval Manuscripts)” corpus and ICFHR 2016 and ICDAR 2017 Competitions on the Classification of Medieval Handwritings in Latin Script. Subsequently, he was co-organiser with V. Christlein, M. Seuret et al., of the ICDAR 2019 Competition on Image Retrieval for Historical Handwritten Documents, ICFHR 2020 Competition on Image Retrieval for Historical Handwritten Fragments and ICDAR 2021 Competition on Historical Document Classification.

Riham Aida Mokrani (riham.mokrani@etu.ephe.psl.eu) is a PhD candidate at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE–PSL), supervised by Peter Stokes and Nuria de Castilla. Her project, Identification of Hands in the Calligraphy of the Central Lands of Islam: The Case of Yāqūt al-Mustaʿṣimī (7th century AH / 13th century CE), examines digital and computational methods, from annotation tools to machine learning, for writer identification in Arabic calligraphy. As the recipient of the ArabicPal fellowship in Arabic paleography modeling and script analysis, she collaborates with the ERC Synergy MiDRASH project, Cluster 4 of Biblissima+, and the Groupe de recherche transversale en paléographie (GRTP), and is part of the eScriptorium team. She also contributes to the Chair of History and Codicology of Arabic Manuscripts, especially to the introductory course on Arabic codicology and the Qurmand Project. Alongside her research, she teaches Classical Arabic at the Institut des Langues Rares (ILARA-EPHE) and supervises bachelor’s and master’s internships within the PSL University Undergraduate Research Opportunity Programs (PSL UROP).

Emilio Russo (emilio.russo@uniroma1.it) teaches Italian Literature at Sapienza University of Rome since 2011, with Full Professor status since 2021. In 2000 he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Chicago, and after completing a postdoctoral fellowship in Italian Studies at the University of Padua (2001–2003) and a research scholarship at the Institute for Historical Studies in Naples (2004), he taught at the Universities of Basel and Freiburg between 2005 and 2008. His research spans major authors and traditions of the Renaissance, the Baroque, and nineteenth-century Italian literature. He has written extensively on figures such as Torquato Tasso, Giovan Battista Marino, Giacomo Leopardi, and Ippolito Nievo.