The La sfera project grew out of two 2020 crowd-sourced transcription events (the La Sfera Challenge) involving over one hundred participating scholars. The two pandemic-era transcription challenges resulted in eight new, complete transcriptions of the La sfera text from various manuscripts held in libraries from across the globe, and in an extended collaboration among some of the initial event participants.

Co-directors

Carrie E. Beneš is Professor of Medieval & Renaissance History at New College of Florida. A cultural historian with extensive experience in spatial history whose research focuses on landscape and urban identity in late medieval Italy, she serves as Co-Director for Spatial Analysis.

Laura Ingallinella, Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Toronto, is a scholar of late medieval and Renaissance Italian literature who specializes in the transregional and cross-linguistic exchanges characteristic of merchant culture. She serves as Co-Director for Editorial Practice, overseeing the new critical Italian edition of Dati’s text.

Amanda Madden is Assistant Professor of History and Director of Geospatial History in the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. Her current research focuses on violence and space in early modern Italy. As Project Co-Director for Visualization, she will oversee the project's web development, design, and hosting.

Laura Morreale is an independent scholar based in Washington, D.C. whose research explores questions of medieval Italian history and historiography using digital methods. She will serve as Co-Director for Project Management, managing overall project design and implementation.

Regular Contributors

Caterina Agostini is a scholar of Italian studies and book history specializing in the history of science in the Renaissance and early modern period. She is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine, at Indiana University Bloomington, as well as Co-Chair of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) Outreach Community Group.

Winston Black, a historian of medicine in medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, is Gatto Chair of Christian Studies at St. Francis Xavier University (Nova Scotia).

Elena Brizio is a social and political historian whose research focuses on Tuscany in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She is Adjunct Professor of History at Georgetown University’s Fiesole Campus.

Monica Keane is Digital Collections & Metadata Coordinator at San Jose State University. She is a scholar of comparative literature, especially late medieval Italian (Dante and Boccaccio) with extensive experience in digital projects and digital archiving.

Matthew Westerby, an art historian of medieval and Renaissance Europe with special expertise in manuscripts and the digital humanities, is the Digital Research Officer at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

How to cite the project

La Sfera (2025), https://dev.lasfera.rrchnm.org/.