Rate My Professor Katarzyna Kapitan

Katarzyna Anna Kapitan is the Junior Professor in Computational Analysis of Written Cultures in Western Space (Middle Ages – First Twentieth Century) at the École nationale des chartes - PSL, attached to the Centre Jean Mabillon for her research mission. Since her appointment on June 1, 2024, through the PSL Junior Professorship program, she teaches in the two digital master's degrees at the institution. As a researcher in manuscripts and digital humanities, she specializes in Old Norse-Icelandic literature and culture. Her academic interests focus on the transmission and circulation history of literary works in pre-modern Scandinavia's intellectual networks, digital scholarly editing of pre-modern texts, digital cataloguing of manuscripts, and the application of computational approaches to estimate loss rates of medieval works and manuscripts.

Prior to joining the École nationale des chartes - PSL, Kapitan held several postdoctoral positions, including a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Digital Scholarship at the Division of Humanities and Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford; a Carlsberg Foundation Junior Research Fellowship at Linacre College, Oxford; and an HM Queen Margrethe II Distinguished Research Fellowship at the University of Iceland, the Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle, and the National Museum of Iceland. She has taught courses in digital humanities, TEI-XML, digital scholarly editing and cataloguing, palaeography, and textual criticism at institutions in the United Kingdom, Iceland, Denmark, Germany, Canada, and Poland. Her recent monograph, Lost but not forgotten: the Saga of Hrómundur and its manuscript transmission (Oxford: Taylor Institution Library, 2024), examines the post-medieval transmission of adaptations of a lost medieval saga, including interactive digital critical editions of three versions. Key publications include 'Forgotten books: the application of unseen species models to the survival of culture' in Science (2022), 'Sagas and genre: A case for application of network analysis to manuscripts preserving Old Norse-Icelandic saga literature' in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (2023), 'The Prose Summary as Antiquarian Tool and Literary Springboard: An Edition and Translation of Ormars þáttur Framarsonar' in Opuscula (2022), and 'When a King of Norway Became a King of Russia: Danish Historiography and Early Transmission and Reception of Hrómundar saga Greipssonar' in Scandinavian Studies (2022). These contributions apply computational methods to advance book history, textual criticism, and philology.