Richard C. Kessler Reformation Collection Research Fellows, 2020-2021

Pitts Theology Library is excited to announce the second cohort of Richard C. Kessler Reformation Collection Research Fellows. These three scholars will conduct year-long research projects on items in the Kessler Collection, producing essays and curating digital exhibitions.

Watch the Conversation amongst the 2020-2021 Kessler Fellows

Alyssa Lehr Evans is a doctoral candidate in History at Princeton Theological Seminary (Princeton, NJ). As a recipient of both Fulbright and DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) Research Fellowships, she studied at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and worked as a member of the Karlstadt Critical Edition team in Germany from 2015-2017. Her dissertation focuses on Karlstadt's writings from 1517-1519, especially his commentary on Augustine's de spiritu et litera, and understanding Karlstadt's early development as a reformer. Alyssa is looking forward to working with the Collection's many Karlstadt prints as a Kessler Fellow, including his Apologeticae Conclusiones (1518) and De legis litera, sive carne, & spiritu (1524).

Drew Thomas is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Researcher in the School of History at University College Dublin. He works on a digital humanities applying machine learning and image recognition software to woodcut illustrations and ornamentation in books from the early modern Holy Roman Empire. He received his bachelor’s degree from Saint Louis University, master’s from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in history from the University of St Andrews in Scotland with a dissertation focusing on the printing industry in Wittenberg during Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation. His research at the Pitts Theology Library investigates contemporary counterfeits of Luther’s writings and their later reception by libraries and book collectors. You can follow him on Twitter at @DrewBThomas.

Edmund Wareham is the Cowdrey Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow in History at St Edmund Hall in Oxford. He undertook undergraduate and graduate studies in History and German at Jesus College in Oxford and the universities of Trier and Freiburg im Breisgau in Germany. His doctorate was an in-depth study of the Cistercian convent of Günterstal, near Freiburg, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He then became a Postdoctoral Research Associate on ‘The Nuns’ Network’ project, which is editing a collection of 1,800 letters from the Benedictine convent of Lüne dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He is very excited by the opportunity to work with the Kessler collection to develop a project on ‘Making and Breaking Vows in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany’.