N. Kıvılcım Yavuz is Lecturer in Medieval Studies and Digital Humanities at the University of Leeds.
Kıvılcım works at the intersection of medieval studies and digital humanities with expertises in medieval historiography, specifically origin stories of medieval peoples and nations, and European manuscript culture, specifically the role of manuscripts as material artefacts in textual transmission and book history. Her research interests include classical reception and comparative literature, particularly the reception of the story of Troy and the image of the Turk in European Middle Ages.
Previously, between September 2019 and August 2022, she was the first Ann Hyde Postdoctoral Researcher at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas. At Kansas, she worked on enhancing access to the library’s substantial holdings of medieval and early modern European manuscripts by conducting new research and creating digital catalogue records for an open access digital repository for the manuscripts. Between August 2018 and August 2019, she was Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Arnamagnæan Institute at the University of Copenhagen. Her work on the Latin manuscripts in the Arnamagnæan Collection resulted, among her other findings, in the rediscovery of a long-thought-to-be-lost library catalogue of Ferdinand Columbus. She serves on the Advisory Board of an ongoing project on this manuscript, “The Book of Books: Hernando Colón’s Libro de los Epítomes,” which is funded by the Carlsberg Foundation and which aims to create a digital edition of the fifteenth-century catalogue. Between August 2016 and August 2018, she was Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Arnamagnæan Institute at the University of Copenhagen, working on her EU-funded digital humanities project entitled “Transtextual Networks in the European Middle Ages: A Digital Corpus of the Trojan Narrative in Latin Manuscripts” under the supervision of Matthew James Driscoll.
Kıvılcım completed her doctoral studies at the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds (2016). Her thesis entitled the “Transmission and Adaptation of the Trojan Narrative in Frankish History between the Sixth and Tenth Centuries” was written under the guidance of Ian N. Wood and William T. Flynn. She received her BA in Comparative Literature at Istanbul Bilgi University (2001) and her MA in Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds (2003). Between her MA and PhD studies, from 2003 to 2011, she worked in Istanbul in arts and culture, publishing, and the higher education industry, primarily in corporate communication and marketing.
Kıvılcım has authored articles on comparative literature as well as medieval culture and history, and edited books on art and culture as well as catalogues of modern and contemporary art exhibitions. As a writing, editing and translating professional, she has also done translations from English into Turkish and Turkish into English for over two decades. She also has presented papers at conferences and given public lectures in Europe and America, including Turkey, the UK, Denmark, the Netherlands, Iceland, France, Austria, Brazil and the US.
Kıvılcım is involved in a newly establishing independent open access publishing house, Kısmet Press, as Co-founder and General Editor. She also has been a contributor to the International Medieval Bibliography since 2007. Between 2011 and 2015, she was Editorial Assistant for the Bulletin of International Medieval Research, and between 2012 and 2016, Review Editor and Editorial Assistant for the Leeds Studies in English. In August 2021, she was elected to the Digital Medievalist Executive Board for a two-year term. In August 2022, she became the Director of the Executive Board. She also serves on the MDR (Database of Medieval Digital Resources) Committee of the Medieval Academy of America. In addition to the Digital Medievalist and the Medieval Academy of America, she is a member of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the European Association for Digital Humanities, the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, the International Comparative Literature Association, the Renaissance Society of America, the American Library Association, the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Early Book Society, the Network for the Study of Caroline Minuscule, the Association Paléographique Internationale, Culture – Écriture – Société, the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, and the British Comparative Literature Association, where she also served as Postgraduate Representative between 2012 and 2015.
She has taught undergraduate-level courses on the history of the late antique, medieval and Renaissance Europe as well as on medieval European literature, and postgraduate-level courses on manuscript studies and digital humanities.
She posts about manuscripts on Twitter and Instagram with the handle @manuscriptsetc.
n. kıvılcım yavuz 