Team HCDH
Members
Our team consists of Prof. Dr. Barbara Mittler (Director), Dr. Florian Nieser (Management), David Shcatz (HiWi), Jonathan Gaede (research assistant) and Mattia Celisi (HiWi). We come from cultural and historical studies backgrounds. With a background in Literary Studies and Digital Humanities, Game Studies, Numismatics, and Classical Archaeology, we see the ongoing growing importance of digital methods in the humanities, as well as the dynamics associated with them, in our consultations with and exchanges with a wide range of research projects, researchers, and students. With a combination of interdisciplinary collaborators, innovative research ideas, and strong service partners, we work to be a contributing and productive part of this dynamic.
Dr. Barbara Mittler (Director)
Dr Barbara Mittler studied sinology, musicology and Japanese in Oxford, Taipei and Heidelberg. She has been Professor of Sinology in Heidelberg since 2004, where she co-founded the Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context" (from 2007) and, building on this, the Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS, opened in 2019). Her research focuses on Chinese cultural politics, with work on Chinese art music, the early press, the Cultural Revolution and image and text in the formation of cultural memory, among other things.
Dr. Florian Nieser (Management)
Dr. Florian Nieser studied German and theology at the University of Tübingen, where he also trained in the field of digital humanities. He also completed his doctorate in the field of heroic semiotics in medieval and ancient French texts in Tübingen; he was a guest researcher in the context of the heroic theme at the University of Freiburg in 2023.
Since 2022, he is the Managing Director of the Heidelberg Center for Digital Humanities, where he previously worked as founder and academic coordinator of the Forum Digital Humanities from 2020. His research interests include the semiotic coding of heroic figures, thing semiotics, transmediality, digital humanities and game studies.
David Schatz
David Schatz is doing his Bachelor's degree in Computational Linguistics (75%) and Psychology (25%). He also works as a student assistant for programming, data-driven research and data engineering in the humanities and has a research focus on recognising and analysing cultural patterns using LLMs.
Jonathan Gaede
Jonathan Gaede studied German Studies and Digital Humanities at JMU Würzburg and supports the HCDH in the conception and implementation of workshops on DH topics and in communication with the research community. His interdisciplinary dissertation project examines the role of astrological-alchemical secret symbols and “special characters” in the scientific literature of the early modern period.
Mattia Celisi
Mattia Celisi is HiWi for programming, DH-consulting and organization.