Hi! My name is Mads and I am Phd Candidate at Yale. My dissertation investigates domestic science and medicine in 17th century England. Specifically, I study the use of human and animal-based ingredients in household medical recipes books from roughly 1580-1720. These sources are all handwritten and largely in English, however they have additions in Latin, French, and Italian. They also tend to include numerous hands and various piecemeal entries as recipes books functioned as a family archive, meaning they can be quite disjointed and sometimes challenging to read given the hand.
I hope that Leo can help me sift through this material (a total of around 200 recipe books) to compile some quantitative data. As I said, I am interested in animal/human ingredients, however, these make up only 10-20 of ingredients used in recipe books, therefore I spend far too much time deciphering text that really isnāt very useful to my research. I hope with the transcriptions, I can move more quickly through this material and identify more easily animal/human based recipes. Additionally, I really need a searchable text, for instance, so I can find listed ingredients, commonalities in descriptions, diseases, etc.
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Iām Semiu, a doctoral student in African history, with a secondary focus on Latin American and Caribbean history at Northwestern University. My research sits at the intersections of racialized slavery, governance, and diaspora in West Africa, employing a multidisciplinary approach that includes colonial archival records, oral histories, vernacular literature, and material culture. My dissertation explores the lasting effects of the Atlantic slave trade and colonial boundary-making on identity politics, linguistic evolution, and missionary activities among Yoruba-speaking communities in Togo from 1760 to 2009. I use sources in Yoruba, Ife, German and French languages in my work. I look forward to trying the application.
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Hi everybody!
My name is Jack and Iām a PhD student at NYU in Latin American and Caribbean history. My research focuses on the ramifications of the Haitian Revolution in Central America. I work mostly with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manuscripts in Spanish, English, and French. I use Leo to transcribe hand-written letters and reports from my time at the Archivo General de CentroamĆ©rica in Guatemala last summer for upcoming work on my dissertation.
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Hi everyone. My name is Cayla and I am a second-year PhD student at Northwestern University. I study the intersections of race, class, and ableism in nineteenth-century African American history. I specifically look at how poor and working class black people living during Reconstruction understood and navigated their condition, as well as how they showed up in white dominated systems of control and confinement. I mostly deal with handwritten documents from the Freedmenās Bureau or smaller, non-federal institutions like state and local prisons, poorhouses, and asylums. Most of these documents are difficult to read due to handwriting. Iām hoping that Leo will help me to cut down on my research time by transcribing these documents and sorting them so that I can more easily determine which are relevant to my research. Iād also appreciate a key word search function. Iām looking forward to testing out Leo and sharing my thoughts.
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Hello everyone! My name is Laura Nelson, and Iām a PhD candidate in the history department at Princeton. I study legal history and African-American history in the nineteenth-century US. My dissertation looks at how Philadelphiaās free Black community developed governance in their social institutions and how their ideas about law developed within these institutions translated as they traveled across these institutions. More specifically, it traces rhetorical strategies that were mobilized in speeches, pamphlets, petitions, and other sources and connects these to legal strategies articulated in legal records connected to slavery, the rights of free Blacks, and the kidnapping of free Blacks.
While Iām interested in using Leo for primary sources connected to my dissertation at a later date, Iām using the beta testing period for Leo for a different project. I co-authored a volume, Seen/Unseen: Hidden Lives in a Community of Enslaved Georgians (UGA Press, 2021) that traces a single community of over 700 people across Georgia, all of whom were enslaved by a single prominent Georgia family. We have identified over 1,200 primary sources from the Howell Cobb Family Papers at the University of Georgia that relate information on this enslaved community. The sources here range from correspondence from both the enslavers and, sometimes, the enslaved, as well as bills of sale, and legal documents. We have photographed over 16,000 images of these manuscripts, but relatively few sources are transcribed. I plan to use Leo to help us get these records transcribed so that we can better share them with the public through our bookās companion website, seenunseenbook.com, where we are continually updating a database of primary sources connected with this enslaved community.
Iāve really enjoyed reading about everyone elseās projects, and Iām looking forward to seeing how they develop!
Laura Nelson
PhD Candidate, History
Princeton University
ln5312@princeton.edu
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Hi all! Iām Serena and Iām a Ph.D. candidate in History at Yale working on early modern religious and media history. My primary corpus for my dissertation consists of Lutheran and Catholic exempla collections from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries. Iām using these sources to examine the ways these two confessional communities adopted and adapted medieval exemplary storytelling to convey religious ideas in converging and contrasting ways. Iāve used Transkribus to transcribe my main corpus, but I want to flesh out my analysis with some adjacent sources which the exempla collections themselves cite: wonder-books, chronicles, sermon collections, etc. While my corpus includes both German and Latin texts, I plan to use Leo on German texts exclusively.
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Hello everyone, my name is Serena Barbieri Willhite, and I am a Ph.D. candidate at Rice University, History department. I am working on creating a database built on the records of the Texas Prison System from its foundation to the dismissal of the convict leasing system (1914). I am planning on using Leo for transcribing petitions for pardons addressed to Texas governors in that timeframe. I am excited to join this group and grateful for the opportunity!
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Hello fellow Italian! Congratulazioni per il tu0 Ph.D. at Oxford!
Fascinating! What software are you using for quantitative analysis?
I am Xinyi Xu, a first-year Ph.D. student in the History Department at William & Mary. I plan to study the cultures of death and mourning in Britain from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century, placing British death culture within a global context of emotions. Currently, I am working on a paper about American Civil War widows, and I will be using Leo to read and analyze handwritten diaries and letters from the Civil War era.
Iām delighted to join this community, and I find everyoneās projects truly fascinating !!!
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Hi, Ben, itās great to see you here! I am Xinyi. Thank you so much for helping me prepare for my PhD interviews last yearāI ended up going to the History Department at William & Mary.
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Hi all, Iām Michael, and Iām a 5th year PhD student at Columbia. Iām interested in the intellectual and legal histories of secularism and religious liberty, and I focus especially on the nineteenth century. My work involves a mixture of manuscript sources - especially correspondence - and printed reports/cases/government records. Iām looking forward to using Leo for the manuscript sources I work with, which are in French and English.
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Hello everyone! I am Mathew, a third-year PhD student in African history at Stanford University.
My research examines healing knowledge systems in nineteenth and early twentieth-century West Africa, with a focus on Nigeria and Ghana. I explore how Western European Christian missionary doctors, African healers, and colonial public health officials produced, disrupted, and contested healing knowledge during this period.
Most of my primary sources consist of missionary letters, diaries, and colonial court records handwritten in 19th and early 20th-century English. Reading these documents requires rigorous effort, cursive reading skills, and careful interpretation.
I plan to use Leo to increase the adequacy and accuracy of the transcription process, making my research more efficient and productive!
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Hi everyone, my name is Amelia and Iām a History PhD student at the University of Sheffield. My research is concerned with the ways that British missionary societies of the 19th century encountered the bodies of Indigenous populations across the Pacific Islands and Melanesia. My thesis specifically uses published material put out by the missionary societies themselves, which are luckily very rich resources, but often difficult to collect for study. My wider research interests include disability history, bodily difference, medical humanities, histories of humanitarianism and popular representations of the body in the 19th century.
My main hurdles to research are that I am a disabled researcher who is limited in the physical trips I can make to archives (that are often not made for users with disabilities in mind!). Digitised material is extremely important for the future of making historical study accessible to all and I am very passionate about it. Iām really excited to try Leo and make my research easier to organise and collect.
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Hi everyone!
My name is Becca and I am a first-year PhD student in African history at Emory University. I am currently working on the political economy in late nineteenth-century Senegal. My work is at the intersection of gender, environment, and the law as I spatially reconstruct locations of socioeconomic activity (domestic sphere, urban marketplace, routes of migratory labor etc.) and socioeconomic contestation (tribunals, places of fugitivity, etc.). Since my research is in its very early stages, I am excited to use Leo to organize and sift through potential source materials like court cases, liberation registers, police files, and correspondences. As of right now, I will be only looking at documents in French.
Cheers!
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Hello!
My name is Geneva and I am a 7th year PhD student in History at Princeton and a 3L at Yale Law School. I work on slave courts, or courts that exclusively tried the crimes of enslaved people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Creating an archive of newly discovered slave court records from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Jamaica, my dissertation asks how the compensation paid to enslavers for their executed enslaved people shaped the political economy of Atlantic slave markets and racialized the development of American criminal defense rights.
Having discovered a wealth of slave court records that previous historians said were lost, I am eager to transcribe as many of the ones I have found. Further, working in the Caribbean, many archives do not allow photos or charge so much for images it is not worth taking them. But, these archives also do not have the funding to properly preserve and protect records from the eighteenth century and earlier. Therefore, I am eager to use Leo to transcribe and preserve these materials before they continue to disappear.
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Hi Everyone!
Iām a PhD candidate in History at Cornell. I work on early modern England, with interest in histories of crime, gender, and sexuality. My dissertation, In a Violent Manner: Sodomy, Same-Gender Sexual Violence and the English Law, c. 1600-1800, is a victim-centered history of sexuality and sexual violence between men. My dissertation uncovers men and boysā experiences of sexual assault and considers how victims described those experiences before common law and naval courts.
I work with legal documents, particularly depositions and trial records, that are mostly in English. While Iām relatively proficient at deciphering 18th century handwriting, 17th century secretary hand can be a challenge (especially because it wasnāt standardized!). So, I plan to use Leo to help gain proficiency in reading secretary hand, and to double check my transcriptions. I want to work on my speed and accuracy.
Feel free to say hi!
Austin
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Hi everyone!
Iām a 2nd year PhD student in History and Early Modern Studies at Yale. My research focuses on fiscal policies, social resistance, and legal reforms in pre-revolutionary France, particularly the Ferme GĆ©nĆ©rale and the Gabelle (salt tax). Iām interested in how taxation shaped state power, local allegiances, and colonial governance.
Before Yale, I completed my MA at the University of Toronto, where I studied Revolutionary Architecture, focusing on Claude-Nicolas Ledouxās vision for industrial cities. My work now also explores royal patronage of manufactures and early modern economic regulation.
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Hello everyone! My name is Anna Pravdica, and Iām a 3rd-year History PhD at the University of Warwick, funded by AHRC-Midlands4Cities. My thesis, currently titled āAuthenticity & Social Identity in Early Modern England, 1640-1740ā, investigates the religious, cultural, and social contexts influenced contemporary ideas about sincerity, deceit, and related concepts in early modern England, and how these attitudes were linked to categories of identity such as occupation, gender, and rank. By exploring how these cultural contexts affected the everyday environments of neighbourhood, labour, and polity amongst non-elite people of the lower and middling sorts, it aims to construct a social history of sincerity āfrom belowā.
A big chunk of my doctoral research involves looking at seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuscripts, particularly legal records and manuscript sermons, in order to consider how some of the ideas Iām looking at might have manifested in more everyday contexts as opposed to simply print representation. Iāve collected and begun to transcribe a large amount of such sources from numerous archives; Iāve been lucky enough to spend time at archives in London and Norwich, in addition to being granted fellowships the Huntington and Newberry libraries in the United States. For the next six months Iāll also be spending a lot of time at the Herefordshire Archive and Records Centre as part of a placement thatās intended to produce one of the larger case studies I want to use for my thesis. So basically, Iām hoping to use Leo to help organise the records Iāve collected from these different archives and assist with the transcription of the huge amount of material Iāve photographed collected - Iām hopeful Leo will help speed up this very time-consuming process!
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Hi everyone!
My name is Brendan Tam. I am currently in the third year of my PhD at the University of Warwick. My research revolves around the role of friendship in British politics during the late Hanoverian period (1760-1837). My contention is that there was a distinct rhetoric of friendship that was invoked in particular political situations across the period to make a variety of claims that could vary from patronage concerns to forging political identity and community.
Much of my source base revolves around private correspondence and diaries that I have been painfully manually transcribing over the last few years. Being able to more efficiently transcribe large volumes of primary source material from a variety of hands will be invaluable to increasing the scope of my research and allow me to experiment methodologically with more quantitative-orientated approaches.
You can find out more information about my work on my Warwick University webpage: ePortfolio of Brendan Tam
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