Present Appointment
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') at the École Pratique des Hautes Études – PSL, Section des Sciences Historiques et Philologiques at the Sorbonne, in Laboratoire Archéologie et Philologie d'Orient et d'Occident (AOrOc, UMR 8546).
Principal areas of research include:
- Developing new visual, verbal and computational methods for the exploration and presentation of handwriting, manuscripts and documents.
- Designing and developing web resources to allow the exploration and citation of historical script in the context of the manuscripts and charters that preserve it.
- Studying the palaeography and book- and charter- production of late Anglo-Saxon England and the 'long' eleventh century.
For further details see Publications and Grant awards.
Principal service activities 'internal' to the EPHE-PSL include the following:
- Co-director of eScriptorium, software using Machine Learning (Artificial Intelligence) for the automatic transcription of historical documents. <https://escriptorium.eu/>
- Executive Committee, CultureLab: Computational Science of Culture, Grand
Programme de Recherche Université PSL. 2025–29
<https://www.culturelab.psl.eu/>
- Member of selection committee for postdoctoral positions (2025).
- Member of selection committee for doctoral bursaries (2026).
- Chargé de mission for Digital Humanities at the EPHE (2018–2023).
- Selection committee for doctoral bursary in Digital Humanities, Université PSL (2026)
- Teaching and supervising MA and PhD students in related fields, particularly Digital Humanities applied to historical handwriting, manuscripts and documents. See further Teaching.
- Actice involvment in preparing proposals for research grants, and contributing to them if awarded.
For external activities (outside EPHE–PSL), see Offices, Project Boards and Consultancies.