Team

Carlo Taviani is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Teramo. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University La Sapienza in Rome and received his PhD from the University of Perugia. He has held fellowships at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rome, I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for the Italian Renaissance Studies, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, the Italian-German Historical Institute in Trent, and the University of Zurich. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, the MacMillan Center at Yale, a visiting lecturer at the University of Cape Town, and associate at the Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global History at Harvard University. He taught at the University of Cape Town, and the University of Bologna.He has worked on revolts, political conflicts, and exiles in Renaissance Italy. More recently, he has been working on the history of the Casa di San Giorgio in Genoa—an institution that managed the public debt—as a model for later business corporations such as the Dutch East India Company and the Mississippi Company. His current work focuses on capitalism in the area of Macaronesia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It looks at the network of European traders and their involvement in the slave trade.

Born in Cologne in 1976, Jörg Hörnschemeyer studied HKI (Computer Science for the Humanities), German Philology and History at the University of Cologne. In 2005, he finished his studies with a thesis on designing and implementing an SVG-based WebGIS application. From 2003 he worked as a software developer for several research projects including: the image database project Prometheus (prometheus-bildarchiv.de) in 2003; the Arachne project (https://arachne.uni-koeln.de/drupal/) at the Archeological Institute of Cologne between 2003 and 2005; the Critical online edition of the reports written by the nuncio Eugenio Pacelli 1917–1929 in 2008. Since 2010 he has worked as research associate at the German Historical Institute in Rome. He received his PhD in 2017 with a thesis in Genetic Editions.

His research focuses on Late Medieval and Early Modern economic history. Particularly, the transpositions of Mediterranean economic institutions into new territories, like Slavery and Plantation economies into the Atlantic and Africa. Furthermore, Genoese merchants and their migration to the Atlantic and their identity construction processes and representation. He is also interested in Social History, Imagines Production, Migration History, Travel Narratives, Maps, and Choreography. Andres has experience in relational database construction, clinical administration, and general management. Some of his articles include The Genoese consulate in Seville and Genoa's French governor Ottaviano Fregoso. A proposal for the study of guild-like institutions through notarial archives and Social Network Analysis (accepted the European History Quarterly), The Genoese Financial Dynamics in Andalusian (1450-1530): Market Functions in the case of Genoese merchants (being reviewed at the Financial History Review), and Motors of production or hoarders of land. The conflicts between the Genoese and Castilian authorities regarding land ownership and sugar production in the Canary Islands (1489-1516), International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 2023.

My current research examines the social and economic history of late medieval and early modern Genoese Mediterranean. I am particularly interested in its role as the nexus of the Mediterranean slave trade and in the expansion of this trade from the Black Sea region through the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic, as well as the social networks underpinning this expansion. My current methodological approach involves the detailed analysis of notarial contracts and the social networks instantiated and consolidated through business partnerships. I am currently modeling these networks with digital humanities and semantic data analysis software to construct a database of slaveholders and enslaved persons in the fifteenth and sixteenth century Mediterranean and plan to extend this modeling to include the commerce in a variety of physical goods between the Atlantic and Mediterranean region.

Ambassador for the Time Machine Organization and a Transkribus Trainer. Lavinia has held the position of Research Fellow at the Department of Humanities at the University of Catania, where she worked on research projects ranging from the analysis of extensive historical archives to the use of big data in historical research. Among these, a noteworthy PRIN 2022 project aimed at developing a database on slavery between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean during the 15th and 16th centuries stands out. Lavinia's main interests focus on Digital Humanities, a field in which she has published numerous articles and participated in international conferences, discussing topics such as the digital transformation of historical archives and the use of artificial intelligence in historical research. She is the author of several monographs that reflect her passion for the history and culture of Sicily and regularly collaborates with scientific journals and specialized blogs. Lavinia is highly skilled in the use of computer technologies, including various text processing, graphics, and video software. These skills enable her to manage digitalization projects and data preservation in historical research, contributing significantly to the advancement of digital historical research.

Salvatore Spina is a Research Fellow in the Department of Humanities of the University of Catania. He is ‘Ambassador for Italy’ for the Time Machine Organisation and a Transkribus Trainer. His research focuses on the technological, economic, and political processes of early modern Sicily. He has worked on digital history and digital methodologies applied to historical research for several years, with a specific focus on both generative and non-generative artificial intelligence. He is the author of several scholarly articles and monographs, including Digital History: Metodologie informatiche per la ricerca storica (Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane). He is also the editor of the digital edition of the Princes of Biscari epistolary corpus and the WAWTW project.