Individual Research Projects

Individual Research Projects (IRPs) are specialised disciplinary-oriented projects on doctoral, postdoctoral and professorial levels. They often focus on individual writing cultures, even specific written artefacts.

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Photo: © Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky

Material Analysis of Written Artefacts from the Roman Army

This project investigates the material composition, production, and use of written artefacts associated with the Roman army.

Photo: Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana

Tangible Politics

In his Latin treatise ‘Monarchia’, Dante Alighieri famously opposed papal claims to supreme power over temporal matters, arguing that the pope’s function is to lead humanity to beatitude in the afterlife, and that peace in this life was instead the emperor’s business.

Saint Mark. Detail showing the hands of the evangelist holding a quill and an inkwell with green ink.

Photo: J. Paul Getty Museum

Painting with Inks and Writing with Paints

This project integrates methodologies from Philology, Art Technology, and Archaeometry, combining work across archival, laboratory, and museum settings. I reproduce colour inks according to Armenian written sources, analyse them, and refer to original Armenian manuscripts.

Photo: Ayanis Excavation Project

Urartian Inscribed Metalwork

The kingdom of Urartu, which flourished in Eastern Anatolia between the 9th and 6th centuries BCE, produced the largest known corpus of inscribed metal objects from the first millennium BCE.

Tattooed arms of Ratger Stubbe and table for the showbread

Photo: Public Domain

Script Tattoos As Written Artefacts

This project examines the human body not only as a surface for inscription but also as a fundamental site where writing, materiality, and identity converge.

Photo: CSMC

The Repurposing of Letters and Personal Writings in Medieval Japanese Buddhism

Dōgetsu Shōnen 道月聖然 (1248–1325) was a prolific Buddhist scholar-monk of the Sanron and Shingon traditions, active in Japan during the Kamakura period (1185–1333).

Enclosed cuneiform tablets at the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara.

Photo: Andreas Schropp

Non-destructive Material Profiling of Clay Tablets

Cuneiform clay tablets are among the earliest written artefact in human history. For thousands of years, these fragile objects have preserved historical data on the languages, societies, literatures, religions, and economics of ancient Western Asia.

Photo: gallica.bnf.fr/Bibliothèque nationale de France

Beyond Text and Pixels

The aim of this project is to build a system that can answer textual questions based on the content and visual organisation of pages from digitised multigraphic historical manuscripts. Answers can consist of direct textual feedback or the retrieval of pages relevant to the question.

Photo: Susana Molins Lliteras

Scribes and Scribal Practices in the ‘Timbuktu Archive’

Recent scholarship on the manuscripts of Timbuktu and West Africa more generally has emphasised the prevalence of copies, sometimes resulting in an assessment of the archive as a ‘derivative,’ containing ‘mere’ copies of original works composed elsewhere or multiple copies of the same manuscripts.

Photo: Ivana Rentsch

Musical Written Artefacts for 18th Century Opera Staging in London

George Frideric Handel’s conducting scores nearly completely cover his musical dramatic works, and so form a large corpus of performance material for 18th-century musical theatre. The conducting scores were used by Handel during rehearsals and performances of his operas and oratorios in London.

Photo: SUB Hamburg

Annotation Practices in German 20th Century Actors’ Scripts

This project breaks new ground by developing and applying an analytical framework for a type of written artefact that has been largely overlooked in the context of modern and contemporary European theatre: the actors’ script.

Photo: Fenghuang chubanshe

Compiling and Updating Databases of Judicial Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century China

The nineteenth century was a period of major crisis for the Qing Empire (1644–1911). Internal turmoil, combined with growing external pressure from foreign powers, led to significant social, political, and institutional changes.

Photo: CSMC

Investigation of the Autochthonous Microbiota of Parchment and Identification of Potential Microbial Reasons for Decay

Parchment production involves a series of distinct processing steps. Historically widespread in Western Asia and Europe, these steps typically include skinning, soaking, salting, hair removal, stretching, and the final scraping to remove remaining residues.

Photo: BnF

Dynamics in the Production of Aristotle’s Manuscripts of Ethics, Logic, and Natural Philosophy

This project aims to understand ‘material choices’ in Greek manuscripts from the Middle Ages and early modern period (roughly the 9th–16th centuries), using a corpus of about 300 manuscripts containing Aristotle’s treatises on logic and scientific reasoning, ethics, and natural philosophy.

Photo: Palace Museum, Beijing

Colophons on Chinese Paintings, ca. 1100–1900

In the twelth century, in a dramatic shift away from earlier conventions, Chinese literati (文人 wenren) began to write colophons (題跋 tiba) on paintings. Over time, the complexity and nature of these colophons grew and developed into an established practice, binding together the Confucian elite.

Photo: CSMC

Production, Use and Transmission of Administrative Documents on the Village Level in Late Medieval and Early Modern Japan

This project examines administrative documents from the village level with the aim of transcending historiographical boundaries of periodisation between the Middle Ages (c. 1100–1590) and the Early Modern Period (1590–1870) in Japan.

Photo: CSMC

The Textual and Material Transmission

Plato’s Theaetetus has long been regarded as one of the most important dialogues in the history of Western epistemology. Despite the dialogue being aporetic, the task set out in the text by Socrates is remarkable in itself: to seek out a universal definition of knowledge.

Photo: State Archives of Belgium

Engraved Identity and Imprinted Validation

Seals have been used in various civilisations throughout history. They are essential elements in the practices of literate societies.

Photo: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s ‘Fragments’

Before the Romantic aesthetic of the fragment emerged, no composer left behind more fragments than W. A. Mozart.

Photo: CSMC

Holistic Vision Pipeline for Large-Scale Manuscript Analysis and Retrieval

This project aims to enhance digital navigation of multigraphic written artefacts through three complementary computer vision tasks.

Photo: Ulrich Bismayer

Artefacts from Ban Chiang and Neighbouring Excavation Sites, North East Thailand

Recognisable geometric patterns appear on well preserved ancient ceramics from the archaeological UNESCO world heritage site Ban Chiang, Thailand.

Photo: Kaja Harter-Uibopuu

The Epigraphic Heritage of Miletus and Didyma

Ancient Miletus and its sanctuary of Apollo at Didyma are extensively inscribed urban spaces. Thousands of inscriptions survive from these sites, ranging from monumental public decrees and honorific texts to graffiti, tile stamps, funerary inscriptions, and other everyday forms of writing.

Photo: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin

Reading the Scholarly Archive in the Pre-Ottoman Arabic Middle East

Over the last decades, medieval Middle Eastern history has taken a ‘documentary turn’, bringing the question of the archive into focus for the first time. This development has thus far mostly focused on documents produced by and circulating within the political elite (the ‘state’).

Photo: British Museum

Sheep’s Liver as Written Artefact and the Oracle Lore

In Ancient Babylonia, the inner parts of the sacrificial sheep were considered to be a medium through which the gods conveyed their divine messages to the human sphere.

Photo: Caecilia Seler-Sachs/Brownstone and Dolinski

Copies as Mediation Devices

Copies of artefacts, including manuscripts, have been re-evaluated in recent research, conferring thecopies their epistemic and material independence from originals, including in the perspective of museums and collections and in the production of knowledge.

Photo: Nicole Brisch

Archival Practices in Ancient Iraq

The city of Nippur, located in southern Iraq, was the religious center of Mesopotamia during the third and second millennia BCE.

Photo: Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky

The Use of Parchment in Arabic Manuscripts of the Early Islamic Centuries

Parchment was employed as writing support, alongside papyrus, at a crucial moment in the development of the Muslim written tradition. Some of the earliest surviving examples of the Qur’an were written on parchment, but the support was also used to produce private documents and paraliterary texts.

Photo: Avestan Digital Archive

Zoroastrian Scribes and Scribal Practices During the Safavid Period (1501–1722)

Our knowledge of Zoroastrians in Iran during the 11th to 16th centuries, especially regarding manuscript production, is limited due to a lack of sources or their silence. The landscape changes with the ascent of the Safavid Empire (1501–1722 CE), bringing forth more sources on Zoroastrians in Iran.

Photo: British Library

Knowledge Transformation and Strands of Notation

This project takes the working notes of early modern mathematician and natural philosopher Thomas Harriot (1560–1621) as a basis and starting point to investigate the pathways of transformation within the early modern European knowledge system that eventually led to the emergence of modern science.

Photo: SUB Hamburg

On the Path of Ioannes Rhosos’ Quill

Ioannes Rhosos (Ἰωάννης Ῥῶσος) was one of the most prominent Greek calligraphers of the 15th century C. E. He was born in the Greek island of Creta, and he was professionally active for around forty years (1455-1498) in several Italian cities, like Rome, Milan, or Venice.

Photo: Marta Mayer/DESY

Measurements of Paper Components

Paper as a writing support is a very complex and unique material. It is difficult to understand at the molecular level, especially since many of its components are influenced by various environmental factors and subject to deterioration processes occurring at different stages and times.

Photo: Meseret Oldjira

Reconstructing the Library of Dabra Ḥayq ʾƎsṭifānos

Manuscripts, and by extension libraries, have existed in the highlands of Christian Ethiopia and Eritrea since at least Late Antiquity (c. 300–700 CE).

Photo: Mahdi Jampour

Generative AI for Revealing Palimpsests

A palimpsest is a distinctive category of historical manuscript from which the original text was erased, washed, or scraped away to allow the material to be reused for new artefacts.

Photo: Wellcome Collection

Prayer, Protection and Plant Medicine

This project analyses a corpus of six West African manuscripts kept in the Wellcome Library, London. Aligning with the general theme of the collection, these manuscripts fit into the topic of ‘healing’ or ‘medicinal’ manuscripts.

Photo: National Library of Damascus

Beyond Text: Books as Social Artefacts in Early 19th-Century Damascus

This project focuses on the history of an endowed library that was once located in Damascus and belonged to a Ṣūfī Shaykh from the early 19th century named Khālid al-Naqshabandī.

Photo: Sijillāt al-Maḥkamat al-Quds al-Sharʿiyya, Sijill 1, 82-83

Personal Record-keeping among Medieval Islamic Scholars

The transmission of knowledge in the medieval Middle East was documented in great detail. After a book was transmitted, an audition certificate was written in a copy of the transmitted book.

Photo: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin

The Cultural History of Uyghur Literacy in Light of Multilingual and Multiscriptual Manuscripts

This project aims to provide insights into the multicultural world of the Silk Roads by studying the usage of various scripts and languages in the Old Uyghur and Middle Mongolian corpora.

Photo: CSMC

Arabic Music Theory and Music in Manuscripts of the Latin Middle Ages

The project focuses on traces of Arabic music and music theory in Latin medieval Western European manuscripts as multilingual phenomena.