Elisa Cugliana

Elisa Cugliana is a Junior Professor of Digital Humanities with a focus on Scholarly Editing at the University of Cologne. Since her undergraduate studies, she has been researching and actively preserving Cimbrian, an endangered Germanic language spoken in some areas of Northern Italy. During her PhD in Language Sciences and Germanic Philology, completed as a joint degree at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the University of Cologne, she created a Digital Scholarly Edition of a medieval German version of Marco Polo’s travel narrative.

Her recent research focuses on the study and editing of multimodal (medieval) sources, particularly „sortes" texts—interactive divinatory texts and games used in Antiquity and the Middle Ages to predict the future. From a methodological point of view, she is especially interested in formalising and operationalising the editorial workflow, a focus since her PhD, when she co-developed a system for normalising medieval texts. Her research, publications, and collaborations are highly international, with affiliations such as the Institute for Documentology and Editing (IDE) in Germany and the THINK research collective, which brings together scholars from across Europe and the UK. Elisa is an Associate Editor of DSH: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.