Visiting Professors

Thea Lindquist is Professor and Executive Director of the Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship at the University of Colorado Boulder, an interdisciplinary center specializing in expertise and infrastructure for data-intensive research and education and in open publishing. Her research interests include integrating historical and computational approaches in the study of 17th-century European history and data curation for interdisciplinary and highly collaborative research.

Local contact: Eetu Mäkelä

Simon Lindgren is a Professor of Sociology at Umeå University in Sweden and the director of DIGSUM, an interdisciplinary academic research centre studying the social dimensions of digital technology. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Digital Social Research. Lindgren’s research focuses on the relationship between digital media and society with a particular focus on politics and power relations. He studies mobilization and contention on the internet and the consequences of datafication and automation for such processes. He is the author of Data Theory (2020).

Local contact: Katja Valaskivi

Livia Holden (PhD – School of Oriental and African Studies University of London) leads the following projects: Cultural Expertise in Europe: What is it useful for? (EURO-EXPERT) and CULTEXP Proof of Concept, both funded by the European Researc Council (ERC), and Cultural Expertise in South Asia and in Europe, funded by the ISRF. She is Director of Research at the CNRS and affiliated with the Institut de Sciences Juridique et Philosophique de la Sorbonne. She is also affiliated with CHAD Paris Nanterre. She regularly provides expert opinions for cases pertaining to immigration law, family law, and criminal law in the United Kingdom, United States and the Netherlands.

Local contact: Reetta Toivanen

Dr. Ewan Jones is Associate Professor at Downing College, Cambridge, and one of the rare scholars combining literary scholarship with both embodied cognition and the use of computational approaches to intellectual history. His work includes acclaimed readings of 19th-century poetry that build on digital materials arising from historical communities and their cognitive practices. In such studies, Dr Jones has worked in collaboration with the Cambridge Concept Lab on the architecture of conceptual forms and their historical change. His publications include Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form (Cambridge UP 2014) and articles in e.g. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Journal of the History of Ideas, Critical Inquiry, and Victorian Poetry.

Dr. Jones's latest work involves a historical and conceptual account of group attention, seen from a combined literary historical and neuroscientific perspective. How might we reconsider 'close reading' as a specific practice of cognitive attention? How can aesthetic phenomenology shed insight upon historical communities of readers, rather than produce subjective impressionism? How might the computational analysis of large datesets engage constructively (rather than antagonistically) with analogue forms of reading? These questions also extend to pedagogical issues and the question of how we might devise sharable and portable pedagogical routines that de-habituate standard modes of attending.

Dr. Jones has been a Fulbright Scholar, residential fellow at the Swedish Collegium of Advanced Study, and visiting fellow at Ludwig Maximilian Universität and Pomona College. For the academic year 2021/22, he was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.

Local contact: Merja Polvinen

Michael Lewis is Head of Portable Antiquities & Treasure at the British Museum. He manages the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) - which records archaeological finds made by the public in England and Wales - and oversees the administration of the Treasure Act (1996) - through which the most important archaeological finds enter museum collections. The PAS is amongst the largest community archaeology projects in the UK, and its digital dataset is the largest of its kind in Europe. Michael is also Visiting Professor in archaeology at the University of Reading, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London), a Member of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists, an adviser to the All-Party Parliamentary Archaeology Group and a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Arts Scholars.

Michael is a British archaeologist with a particular interest in medieval small finds, specifically those associated with everyday life and religion. Much of this work has focused on studying the relationship between these find types and their place in the medieval landscape, including through digital humanities approaches. He also has a long-term interest in the Bayeux Tapestry, which was the subject of his PhD. For five years he was a Special Police Constable with the Metropolitan Police’s Art & Antiques Unit and represents ‘portable antiquities’ issues within the National Police Chief’s Council’s Cultural Property & Heritage Crime working group.

With these experiences and expertise, Michael has published widely on many aspects relating to British archaeology, including small finds research and cultural property protection.

Local contact: Eljas Oksanen

Urska Sadl's primary research interests include the empirical studies of European courts and their jurisprudence, the language of courts, the theory and practice of judicial precedents as well as topics in European constitutional law more generally. She is joining the EUI after working at iCourts centre of Excellence for International Courts at the Faculty of Law in Copenhagen. She obtained her BA and Master degree in law from the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana. Urška also holds a LL.M. degree in Legal Studies from the College of Europe in Brugge and a PhD degree from the University of Copenhagen. She has completed research stays at King's College, London, Institute of European and Comparative Law at the University of Oxford and most recently visited the University of Michigan as Michigan Grotius Research Scholar. Her research appears i.a. in the European Law Journal, the European Law Review, the European Journal of Legal Studies and the European Constitutional Law Review.

Local contact: Riikka Koulu, Suvi Sankari

Sérgio Sauer is PhD in Sociology and professor at the University of Brasília (UnB), in the Graduate Program in Environment and Rural Development (PPG-Mader) and in the Center for Sustainable Development (CDS/UnB). He is member of the team of editors of the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) and hold a research scholarship of the CNPq (research institute of the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology). Among his research themes are (rural) development and the environment, especially the struggle for land, agrarian extractivism, and the rights of rural people.

Local contact: Markus Kröger

Ruth Ayaß is professor for sociology at Bielefeld University. Her research focuses on sociology of everyday interaction, ethnomethodology, and interpretive sociology.

Local contact: Ilkka Arminen

Lars-Erik Malmberg is a Professor of Quantitative Methods in Education at University of Oxford. He started off as a primary school teacher in Finland. He is Docent in Education with particular focus on quantitative methods, at Åbo Akademi University, Vasa, Finland, where he earned his Doctorate of Education. He completed his post-doc at Yale University and enjoyed the prestigious Research Councils UK (RCUK) academic fellowship 2007-12. He applies advanced quantitative models to the investigation of substantive research questions in education. He recently completed the ESRC-funded seminar series called “Network on Intrapersonal Research in Education”.

Local contact: Katariina Salmela-Aro

Barbara Pfetsch is a Professor of Communication Theory and Media Effects Research at the Department of Media and Communication at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany and principal investigator at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society. She is also involved in the Collaborative Research Centre “Re-Figuration of Spaces” (SFB 1265) at the TU Berlin. Her research focuses on changes of public spheres and political communication through the digitization and transnationalization and her projects include analyses of digital spaces issue networks, political discourse, (online) media debates and agenda building and the emergence of European and transnational public spheres.

Local contact: Juha Herkman

Mirko Schäfer is Associate Professor at Utrecht University's research area Governing the Digital Society. He is co-founder and project leader of the Utrecht Data School. Schäfer's research interest revolves around the socio-political impact of (media) technology. With the Utrecht Data School and the Datafied Society research platform, he investigates the impact of data practices and algorithms on public management, public media and public space.

Local contact: Minna Ruckenstein

Mike Ananny is an Associate Professor of Communication and Journalism and Affiliated Faculty of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. He studies the public significance of digital news infrastructures and algorithmic systems, and co-directs the interdisciplinary USC collective MASTS (Media As SocioTechnical Systems) and the Sloan Foundation project Knowing Machines (with Kate Crawford and Jason Schultz). He holds a PhD from Stanford University, a Masters from the MIT Media Laboratory, and has written for popular press publications including The Atlantic, Wired Magazine, Harvard's Nieman Lab, and the Columbia Journalism Review.

Local contact: Kaius Sinnemäki

Dries Daems is Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Social Sciences in the M.Sc. program of Settlement Archaeology at Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara. He is also coordinator of the M.Sc. program of Digital Archaeology at METU. His research interests include the study of social complexity and urbanism through computational modeling (ABM) and material studies (macroscopic pottery analysis). He specializes in Iron Age to Hellenistic Anatolia and the Eastern Mediterranean.

Local contact: Marta Lorenzon

Dr. Mark Ellison is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at University of Cologne. He is a specialist in mathematical and computational modelling to language variation, change, and evolution. He has degrees in mathematics, computer science, and linguistics and is currently working in the DFG funded Collaborative Research Centre on Prominence in Language.

Local contact: Jutta Jokiranta

Amanda Lagerkvist is a Professor of Media and Communication Studies and a founder of existential media studies. Her work explores digital-human vulnerabilities in light of existential philosophy, focusing empirically on death online, digital memories, and on increased automation of human life and the Earth. She heads the BioMe project which explores existential and ethical challenges of biometric AI within the human lifeworld.

Local contact: Johanna Sumiala

Mladen Popović studied at the University of Groningen, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and Yale University. He conducted archaeological research in Megiddo and Jerusalem. Popović is  head of the Qumran Institute of the University of Groningen, which has a leading role within the Netherlands in the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. As of September 2017, Popovic has been appointed as the dean of the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies.

Local contact: Jutta Jokiranta