Jakub Kabala
Associate Professor of History and Film, Media, and Digital Studies
Education
- Ph.D., A.M. Harvard University
- A.B. Harvard University
Background
I offer courses on the history and archaeology of Europe in the Middle Ages as well as digital research methods in the humanities. My research explores Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, medieval frontiers and imagined geographies, computational philology as well as digital spatial analysis.
Currently I am writing a book on the ways authors around the year 1000 in the Latin West, Byzantium, and the Slavic world imagined space, territories, and boundaries. I am fascinated by how various cultures of power, written traditions, and organizations of landed wealth shaped the mental maps of medieval men and women. I am developing digital methods of spatial and textual analysis in order to visualize the imagined geographies of my authors and to detect patterns of thought in their writing. Another research area explores computational methods of authorship attribution. I am currently working on a fascinating case of anonymous authorship in a corpus of Latin texts from the twelfth century.
I am excited to work with students from a broad range of majors and backgrounds. In coming years I look forward to developing courses in medieval environmental history as well as digital techniques of archaeological research and network analysis.
Outside of teaching and research I enjoy music, racquet sports and a good comedy.
Teaching
- DIG 101 Introduction to Digital Studies
- DIG 120 Programming in the Humanities
- HIS 112 Medieval Millennium, 500-1500
- HIS 325 Central Europe in the Middle Ages