I am Professor of Cultural Evolution at the University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow in Human Sciences at Regent’s Park College. At the Alan Turing Institute I am the Academic Lead on Data Science and AI for the Arts and Humanities. I am the Founding Director of the Seshat Global History Databank project.
My research draws on the fields of cultural evolution, history, digital humanities and data science and AI. A unifying theme across my research strands is the question how to foster greater consilience across the humanities, social sciences, and data science. A first research strand engages with questions how to write quantitative world history, especially using long timescales. Most of my work in this strand centres on my Seshat Global History Databank project which I founded, together with Peter Turchin and Harvey Whitehouse, in 2011, and of which I am the Executive Director. I am especially interested in explaining the evolution of social complexity and the role warfare, ritual, and religious tolerance play in this evolution. More generally I am keen to understand the deep drivers of what makes societies more cohesive, resilient, and peaceful and how these insights can be leveraged by the policy world. This last research takes places in the framework of the Defence & Security Grand Challenge at the Alan Turing Institute.
Building upon this first research strand a second research strand focuses on how to create infrastructures that will enable large scale collaboration across the arts and humanities, and the GLAM world. My interests lie both in understanding better the process of how to build large scale infrastructures and in issues of governance, ethics, and collaborative culture. I further this research strand through the project ‘Data/Culture. Building Sustainable Scholarly Communities around Arts and Humanities datasets and software’ of which I am the PI.
Thirdly I work on the topic of Freedom of Religion or Belief (FoRB), and more generally religious tolerance, and how this topic intersects with the Sustainable Development Goals. I am the PI of the Freedom of Religion or Belief Leadership Network (FoRBLeadership Network). Finally, I have an older but still ongoing research strand which focuses on Victorian travellers on the Continent and on how to make use of digital humanities methods to study nineteenth century material.
Full academic profile on the Regent's Park College website.