Guy Geltner is Professor of medieval history at the University of Amsterdam and a founder of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Amsterdam. He is the Principal Investigator of Premodern Healthscaping and focuses on the development of preventative policies and practices in a number of towns in later medieval Italy, whose archives he’s been exploring for the last 15 years.

Claire Weeda is a cultural historian whose main fields of interest include medicine, the body politic, socio-cultural indexation and community formation in later medieval Europe. She is currently focusing on public health and organic politics in urban centres, tapping political and health regimens, mirrors of princes, sermons and conduct manuals as well as documents of practice such as political deliberations and bylaws. Her research looks at the politics in health and the health in politics in late medieval urban society.

Janna Coomans is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Medieval History. She defended her dissertation titled “In Pursuit of a Healthy City: Sanitation and the Common Good in the Late Medieval Low Countries”, in June 2018. Her current research project explores the practices of various agents to promote communal wellbeing in the late medieval urban Low Countries. Her main research interests are the history of (public) health; social and urban history and more theoretical explorations of spatiality and materiality; as well as gender, medicine, crime, and urban governance.

Taylor Zaneri has a PhD from New York University with a focus in Anthropological Archaeology. Her dissertation research combined GIS modeling and zooarchaeology to study food production in medieval Lucca, Tuscany. She currently serves as a GIS and Informatics instructor on the excavation of Badia Pozzeveri in Altopascio, Italy. In addition, she has participated in excavations of medieval sites in Southern France and Sicily.

Léa Hermenault is a post-doc researcher. She has a PhD from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University in medieval and modern urban archaeology. Her dissertation analyses the effects of daily circulations on the urban fabric (streets, buildings, plots, etc.) of Paris between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, using a large range of sources and GIS technology. In her research,  she tries to combine urban history and archaeology by exploring the impact of urban material constraints on social processes.

Lola Digard is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Medieval History. She obtained a Master in Medieval studies from the University of Lyon Lumière by presenting a thesis entitled “Quid est flebotomia: The practice of bloodletting in the context of Cloister medicine.” Her main research interests are the history of science and medicine, as well as social and religious history.

Peyman Amiri is a PhD researcher at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. His research, which intersects history and political theory, examines formations of resistance manifested in practices of everyday life under conditions of extreme control. He functions as the research coordinator in the Premodern Healthscaping Research Project.

Advisory Board

HealthScaping boasts a distinguished, international supervisory board, whose role is to assist individual members and the team as a whole to critically situate their research within different fields of expertise. It consists of the following scholars:

• Dr. Chloe Deligne (Archaeology; Free University of Brussels)
• Dr. Fritz Dross (Medical History; Erlangen University)
• Prof. Monica Green (Global Health History, Independent scholar)
• Dr. Jelle Haemers (Low Countries History; University of Leuven)
• Prof. John Henderson (Public Health History; Birkbeck College, University of London)
• Dr. Roos van Oosten (Low Countries Archaeology, Leiden University)
• Prof. Andrea Zorzi (Italian History; University of Florence)