ZKS Post-Doctoral Fellowships

Supported by the Zeno Karl Schindler Foundation and other benefactors

Generous gifts from the Zeno Karl Schindler (ZKS) Foundation and other benefactors named in the fellowship titles have allowed us first to support research on the collections of Durham Priory Library, including their origin, manufacture, content, decoration, and history of the texts, with the specific aim of enhancing scholarly engagement with the Durham Priory Library Recreated Project. More latterly the focus of these fellowships has been to support research on the Scientific Study of Manuscripts and Inscriptions (SSoMI).

Applications for these fellowships are currently closed. Please check back here for future calls or subscribe to our mailing list, via our homepage, to receive notifications.

Our most recent fellows

Dr J. D. Sargan 

ZKS-Lendrum Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Scientific Study of Manuscripts and Inscriptions (1 September 2021 – 31 August 2022)

Read James Sargan's End-of-Fellowship Report

James D. Sargan is a book historian, who earned his doctorate on early Middle English reading practices from the University of Oxford (2018). His interests in this work, as represented by his forthcoming book, focus on dynamic, embodied use of books as facilitated by their surfaces, materials, and codicological structures. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in English Studies, the Journal of the Early Book Society, and the Journal of English and Germanic Philology. He comes to Durham from a Leverhulme Trust-funded postdoctoral fellowship in the Old Books New Science Lab at the University of Toronto. As part of this fellowship, he worked with colleagues on the Mellon-funded project, The Book and the Silk Roads, to develop the application of micro-CT imaging as a technique for the study of early binding structures. At Durham he will be applying this technique alongside other newly developing lighter-weight radiographic techniques to the identification, analysis, and cataloguing of the no-longer-extant medieval bindings of manuscripts from Durham Cathedral Priory Library.

Dr Matthew Davis 

ZKS-Lendrum Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Scientific Study of Manuscripts and Inscriptions (1 January 2022-31 December 2022)

Read Matt Davis' End-of-Fellowship Report

Matthew Evan Davis received his PhD in English literature (with a certificate in Digital Humanities) from Texas A&M University in 2013. Before coming to Durham he served as the Ruth and Lewis Sherman Centre Postdoctoral Fellow at McMaster University, as a Lindsey Young Visiting Faculty Fellow at the University of Tennessee’s Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and as the Council of Library and Information Resources/Mellon Fellow in Data Curation for Medieval Studies at North Carolina State University. Additionally, he has served as a consultant on several digital projects in the GLAM sphere and is the editor of two volumes dealing with the use of digital tools and methods for the study of medieval and early modern culture: Meeting the Medieval in a Digital World (with Ece Turantor and Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel) and New Technologies and Renaissance Studies III (with Colin Wilder). His scholarly work deals with the histories of the book, staging practices of medieval drama, cultural transmission through what he calls “informational palimpsests,” and material and digital curation as a means of preserving both the material object and the connections between the object, the content contained by that object, and its multiple affiliations.

While at Durham, Dr. Davis will be transcribing several works by the fifteenth-century poet and dramatist, John Lydgate, for his digital archive of the poet’s literary corpus with the intention of exploring the best ways to capture the materiality of the text in a digital facsimile. Additionally, he will be investigating the possibility of whether works traditionally characterized as poems might have originally been intended for performance.