Summary
Peter Stokes is directeur d'études en humanités numériques et computationnelles appliquées à l’étude de l’écrit ancien (approximately 'research professor in digital and computational humanities applied to historical writing') and Chargé de mission for Digital Humanities at the École Pratique des Hautes Études – Université PSL in Paris, Section des Sciences Historiques et Philologiques, Laboratoire Archéologie et Philologie d’Orient et d’Occident (AOROC, UMR 8546). Combining the fields of palaeography, digital humanities and computer science, his current primary research focus is on theoretical and practical questions around the description and analysis of handwriting, and multigraphism (the simultaneous use of different scripts or writing-systems in a given culture), and transversal palaeography.
After two Honours degrees at the University of Melbourne (Australia), one degree in Classics and English Literature and the other in Computer Engineering, Peter Stokes completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge on English palaeography of the early eleventh century. He held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in Palaeography at the Department of Anglo-Saxon Norse and Celtic in Cambridge, where he developed new methods of quantitative and computer-based palaeography, and worked at the Centre for Computing in Humanities (now Department of Digital Humanities) at King's College London on the LangScape, Anglo-Saxon Cluster and Electronic Sawyer projects before being awarded a major research grant from the European Research Council for his DigiPal: Digital Resource and Database for Palaeography, Manuscript Studies and Diplomatic. This project, completed in September 2014, lead to two further major grants from the AHRC for collaborative projects in which he was Co-Investigator: Exon: The Domesday Survey of South-West England (with the University of Oxford), and Models of Authority: Scottish Charters and the Emergence of Government, 1100–1250 (with the Universities of Glasgow and Cambridge).
In 2018 he moved to Paris to take up his current professorship at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), where his projects included Work Package leader for the Horizon 2020 project RESILIENCE (accepted to the ESFRI Roadmap), and he is currently co-director of eScriptorium for the automatic and manual transcription of handwritten documents, and Coordinator of Cluster 4 for the French national project Biblissima+.
Major publications include English Vernacular Minuscule from Æthelred to Cnut, circa 990 – circa 1035 (Cambridge, 2014) as well as DigiPal, Exon and MoA, and he has also published on name-studies, lexicography, Anglo-Saxon charters, image-processing, and digital humanities, as well as palaeography. He lectures on the PSL Masters in Digital Humanities as well as giving a Conférence (post-graduate research seminar) at the EPHE, and has lectured in palaeography and codicology, digital publishing, medieval history, medieval Latin and Digital Humanities at King's College London, the Universities of Cambridge and of Leicester, the School of Advanced Studies in the University of London, and the University of Tours. Other professional positions include:
- Elected to the Comité of Humanistica, the Francophone Association of Digital Humanities (2021–2024).
- Elected to the Bureau of the Comité International de Paléographie Latine (2020–2025).
- Invited Researcher or Professor at the Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes (Paris, 2015), Università degli Studi (Florence, 2019), and Università 'La Sapienza' (Rome, 2024).
- Visiting Senior Research Fellow, Department of Digital Humanities and King's Digital Lab, King's College London.