My research is in the field of Digital Humanities with a particular strength in designing large-scale collaborative projects. My research fits within two broad strands. A first strand focuses on novel ways to integrate the social sciences and the humanities. I am especially interested in fostering such a consilience between the disciplines of history, cultural evolution and the digital humanities. I am the Deputy Director of the Centre for Study of Social Cohesion and the Founding Director of the Seshat: Global History Databank. My Seshat project brings together historical and archaeological Big Data to study changes playing out over long timescales, usually millennia. I have worked and published on such fundamental changes in the evolution of social complexity, ritual and ritualistic behaviour, warfare, and levels of inequality. Over the past seven years the Seshat project has attracted several multi-million grants of which I am usually the Co-PI or Co-I. These grants include an ESRC Large Grant ‘Ritual, Community, and Conflict’, a Horizon2020 grant ‘ALIGNED: Quality-centric Software and Data Engineering’, and an ERC Advanced Grant ‘Ritual Modes: Divergent modes of ritual, social cohesion, prosociality, and conflict (PI Harvey Whitehouse)’. I am also the PI and overall Lead of the Freedom of Religion or Belief Leadership Network (UK Aid).

A second strand of my research focuses on applying a digital humanities approach to the study of nineteenth century travel, migration and history of the book. In 2013 I won the international British Library Labs competition with my ‘Sample Generator for Digitized Texts’. I am currently working on nineteenth-century British travellers to the Continent and on nineteenth-century intercity migration within Ostend, Belgium. I am also a Member of the Management Committee of Cost Action ‘Distant Reading for European Literary History’.

My Role in College

I am an Associate Professor in Cultural Evolution at the University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow in Human Sciences at Regent’s Park College. I am a former fellow of both St Benet’s Hall and St Cross College, Oxford.

I am also a Senior Research Fellow and Academic Lead on Data Science and AI for the Arts and Humanities at the Alan Turing Institute. At the Turing I am the PI of the Accelerating AI for the Arts and Humanities project. I am also a Senior Fellow of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict (CRIC).