Team
Leadership
David Zbíral
David (Ph.D. in the Study of Religions from Masaryk University, 2008) is the lead author and principal investigator of the DISSINET project. He focuses on inquisitorial records from Languedoc and Lombardy (1230s-1320s) to make sense of the situational emergence, transmission, and functioning of rituals, beliefs, and organizational forms of dissident religious cultures. He is also interested in the spatial patterns of dissent, such as the spatial distribution of rituals and the mobility of dissident ministers, and in the discursive qualities of deposition narratives.
Robert L. J. Shaw
Robert (DPhil in History from the University of Oxford, 2014) is the deputy principal investigator of the DISSINET project. His research, focused on Languedoc, systematically analyses the factors affecting the sentencing of dissidents, including social interactions and relationships. He is also interested in the path dependencies of the narratives found in inquisition records. His previous research has focused on the religious networks forged by late medieval monastic reform, both between cloisters and beyond them.
Jolana Navrátilová
Jolana (MA in Sociology and English language and literature from Masaryk University, 1998) is the managing assistant of the DISSINET project. She has worked in the university's international office and PR department, and participated in several NGO projects (including EU grant-funded projects). She also translates from English (both fiction and non-fiction) and enjoys sci-fi, medieval history, and walks.
Research fellows
Stanislaw Banach
Stanislaw (MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, 2019) is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Cambridge. His doctoral dissertation is a comparative study of revolt and violent conflict across the towns of Silesia, Poland, and Prussia during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. His interest in urban history carries over to DISSINET, where he concentrates on the inquisitions of Waldensians in Fribourg (1399, 1430) and Strasbourg (1400-1401).
Zoltán Brys
Zoltan (currently finishing his PhD in Sociology) is a computational social researcher. Before joining DISSINET he was teaching data analysis and social psychology and also doing research in these fields at Semmelweis University, Hungary. He received the Róbert Kolossváry Memorial Prize in 2021. Methodologically, he uses both traditional frequentist methods and modern techniques such as machine learning and network analysis. In the DISSINET project he focuses on social network analysis.
Tomáš Hampejs
Tomáš (Ph.D. in the Study of Religions from Masaryk University, 2020) is a data analyst, programmer, and computational social and cognitive science enthusiast. He devises and maintains the digital infrastructure for data collection in the DISSINET project and designs various tools for data transformation. He is interested in social scientific theory, the formalized modelling of complex phenomena, and bridging the social and the cognitive aspects of religion.
Gideon Kotzé
Gideon (PhD in Computational Linguistics at the University of Groningen, 2013) is a researcher and developer with special interest in text corpora, treebanks, machine translation, digitization, and wordnets. Before joining DISSINET, he worked on a web application for geographical terminology and a mobile application for place names in English and South African Sign Language. In the DISSINET project, he works on the representation and data storage of a corpus of inquisitorial records, while applying text mining and other natural language processing techniques for the extraction of useful information for visualization and research.
Katia Riccardo
Katia (MA in Medieval Studies from Utrecht University, 2020) joined the DISSINET project as a Ph.D. candidate in the study of religions at Masaryk University. Her previous research has focused on the political and religious history of the early Middle Ages, with a particular focus on theological debates in the Carolingian period. Within the DISSINET project she studies the beliefs and practices of Cathars and Apostles as they emerge from the trial interactions contained in the inquisitorial register of Bologna (1291-1310). With the employment of computational techniques such as CTA and SNA, she aims to analyse the depositions of the people involved and the discursive patterns of their testimonies, focusing on the declarations of their beliefs as well as reporting on other people related to their social network.
Kaarel Sikk
Kaarel (PhD in Quantitative Geography at the University of Luxemburg, 2022) is a data / software engineer who has turned to research. Before joining DISSINET he was studying archaeological data science focusing on spatial data. His interests include spatial statistics, exploratory data analysis, complex adaptive systems, and emergence in the context of historical social processes. In his doctoral work, he uses various modelling techniques to study archaeological settlement pattern formation processes as self-organising complex systems. In the DISSINET project he focuses on geospatial data analysis, cartography, geographical application development, as well as spatial statistics and modelling.
Katalin Suba
Katalin (MA in Medieval Art History from Eötvös Loránd University, 2018) is a PhD candidate in art history with an interest in medieval textual sources. Before joining DISSINET, she was involved in research focusing on the comparative analysis of medieval rituals. Within DISSINET, she studies the rituals of dissident religious communities using quantitative methods.
Software developers
Adam Mertel
Adam (Ph.D. in Cartography, geoinformatics and remote sensing from Masaryk University, 2020) is a geospatial analyst and applications developer. He leads the development of the InkVisitor research environment including the DISSINET research database. He also explores DISSINET data through maps, applications, and analyses.
Associates
Larissa de Freitas Lyth
Larissa (MA in History from Universidade Federal do Paraná, 2021) is a Ph.D. candidate in the study of medieval history in Cambridge. Her previous research has focused on magical practices and sexuality in the Early Middle Ages. Within DISSINET, she studies 15th-century witchcraft trials and the imagery surrounding the witches’ sabbath. With the aid of quantitative approaches such as natural language processing and social network analysis she analyses how the narrativity and interactivity in the trials affected the way inquisitorial discourse against witchcraft was formed and how medieval knowledge of heresy was perpetuated and transformed in early witchcraft trials.
Reima Välimäki
Reima is a cultural historian focusing on late medieval inquisition and Waldensianism, polemical literature and the Great Western Schism. He is interested in combining computational tools such as text reuse analysis and authorship attribution with qualitative study of medieval texts and manuscripts. Reima is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies and Adjunct Professor of Medieval History at the University of Turku.
