I’m a Welsh medievalist with specializations in manuscript studies, archives, information technologies, and early British literature. I teach core courses in British Literary History, on Text Technologies, and Palaeography and Archival Studies. I supervise honors students and graduate students working in early literature, Book History, and Digital Humanities and I am committed to providing a supportive and ethical environment in all my work. My current projects focus on death and trauma, on manuscripts and on the history of writing systems. I’m currently completing new research on Neil Ripley Ker, his Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon, and his methods as a manuscript scholar. I recently published Disrupting Categories, 1050 to 1250: Rethinking the Humanities through Premodern Texts (ARC Humanities Press, 2024); Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book with OUP in 2021; A Very Short Introduction to Medieval Literature (OUP, 2015); Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English (OUP, 2012). Also recently published is the two part issue 13 (2024) of Digital Philology on “Fragmentology” (with Ben Albritton and Shiva Mihan); and the Cambridge Companion to British Medieval Manuscripts, co-edited with Dr Orietta Da Rold for CambridgeUP in 2020.

I am the Director of Stanford Text Technologies (https://texttechnologies.stanford.edu), and, with Claude Willan, published Text Technologies: A History in 2019 (StanfordUP). Other projects include “Digital Ker”—an online digitization and updating of Neil R. Ker’s 1957 Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon, together with newly published archival materials of Ker’s. I am also PI of CyberText Technologies (https://digitalker.stanford.edu); on a project investigating the complex subject of personal archives—SOPES; and Medieval Networks of Memory with Mateusz Fafinski, which analyzes two thirteenth-century mortuary rolls. Text Technologies' initiatives include a regular Collegium: the first, on “Distortion” was published as Textual Distortion in 2017; the fourth was published by Routledge as Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age in 2020. I am the Principal Investigator of the NEH-Funded 'Stanford Global Currents' (https://globalcurrents.stanford.edu/) and Co-PI of the AHRC-funded research project and ebook, The Production and Use of English Manuscripts, 1060 to 1220 (Leicester, 2010; version 2.0 https://em1060.stanford.edu/). With Benjamin Albritton, I run Stanford Manuscript Studies; and with Thomas Mullaney and Kathryn Starkey, I co-direct SILICON (https://silicon.stanford.edu/).

In 2024-2025, I’m delighted to be a Stanford Impact Labs Design Fellow, developing archival tools and guidelines. I’m also the President of the Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland (TOEBI). I have been an American Philosophical Society Franklin Fellow, a Princeton Procter Fellow, and a Fellow of the Stanford Clayman Institute for Gender Studies. I'm a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries; a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; an Honorary Lifetime Fellow of the English Association (and former Chair and President); and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

Dr. Ali Yaycıoğlu is a historian specializing in the History of the Ottoman Empire, Middle East, and Modern Turkey. Currently he is serving as the director of the Abbasi Program of Islamic Studies and the Middle East Studies Forum.

His research focuses on different dimensions of political, economic, and legal institutions and practices, as well as the social and cultural dynamics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dr. Yaycıoğlu is particularly intrigued by visions, representations, and documentation of concepts like property, territory, and nature in early periods. His is also interested in the application of digital tools to comprehend, visualize, and conceptualize these historical perspectives. Dr. Yaycıoğlu offers courses on the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Empires, Markets, and Networks in the Early Modern World, Global History of the Age of Revolutions, Doing Economic History, and Digital Humanities.

Dr. Yaycıoğlu's first book, Partners of the Empire: Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Stanford, 2016), reevaluates the Ottoman Empire within the global context of the revolutionary age in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He also co-edited the Ottoman Digital Humanities Special Issue of the Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies (2023) and Crafting History: Essays on the Ottoman World and Beyond in Honor of Cemal Kafadar (Boston, 2023). Dr. Yaycıoğlu's essays on the history and contemporary affairs of the Republic of Turkey were published in his Uncertain Past Time: Empire, Republic, and Politics (in Turkish, Istanbul, 2024).

Currently, he is immersed in two book projects: Karlowitz Moment: The Ottoman Empire and the Making of the Modern World, 1699-1839, a reconsideration of the Ottoman experience in the global context during the long eighteenth century and The Order of Debt: Power, Wealth, and Death in the Ottoman Empire, analyzing property, finance, and Ottoman statehood in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Dr. Yaycıoğlu is the co-editor of the Stanford Ottoman World Series: Critical Studies in Empire, Nature and Knowledge also oversees a digital history project, Mapping Ottoman Epirus, housed in Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA).

Born and raised in Ankara, Turkey, Dr. Yaycıoğlu earned degrees in International Relations from the Middle East Technical University and Ottoman History from Bilkent University. Further studies led him to McGill University in Montreal, where he focused on Arabic and Islamic legal history. He completed his Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard in 2008, followed by post-doctoral studies in the Agha Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard and later in Hellenic Studies at Princeton. He Joined the History Department at Stanford in 2011. Dr. Yaycıoğlu regularly writes opinion pieces in Gazete Oksijen and other venues in Turkish and English on History and contemporary politics, mainly focusing on Turkey and the Middle East. In parallel with his academic pursuits, Dr. Yaycıoğlu is engaged in visual arts under the name "Critical Imagination," conducting artistic work in Palo Alto and Istanbul through the Atölye20 platform.

Josiah Ober, Mitsotakis Professor in the School of Humanities and Science, works on historical institutionalism and political theory, focusing on democratic theory and the contemporary relevance of the political thought and practice of the ancient Greek world. He is the author of Demopolis: Democracy before Liberalism (2017), The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (2015) and other books, mostly published by Princeton University Press, including Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989), Political Dissent in Democratic Athens (2008), and Democracy and Knowledge (2008). He has also published about 100 articles and chapters, including recent articles in American Political Science Review, Philosophical Studies, Polis, Public Choice, Critical Review, and Transactions of the American Philological Association. Work in progress includes books on instrumental rationality in classical Greek thought and the role of civic bargains in the emergence and persistence of democratic government.