Dr Jack Newman
About
Dr Jack Newman is a Leverhulme Funded Post-doctoral Researcher based at the Centre for Digital Humanities and Literary Criticism, University of Antwerp. Formerly, he was Royal Historical Society Centenary Fellow (2019-20) at the Institute for Historical Research and CHASE (AHRC) funded Doctoral Candidate at the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent.
Currently, Jack is working on my Leverhulme funded project at the Antwerp Centre for Digital Humanities and Literary Criticism. In this post he is developing a Handwriting Text Recognition (HTR) model for the fourteenth-century records of the court of The King’s Bench. Additionally, he is working on an exploration of YouTube medievalisms in order to understand how users of that site are encountering narratives about the medieval world.
Recently, Jack has focussed on increasing engagement with the study of the past through imaginative collaborations with researchers in the visual arts. In this vein he was the International Project Co-Lead for ‘Stories of Spoil’ which collected personal accounts from Channel Tunnel Workers and local residents.
Previously Jack was the Royal Historical Society’s Centenary fellow at the Institute of Historical Research and a CHASE funded doctoral candidate based at the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) at the University of Kent.
After ten years as a painter and decorator Jack began his studies at the Open University before completing a BA in History at Kent. Subsequently, he found his home during an MA at MEMS where he began a CHASE AHRC doctoral studentship in 2016.
Jack’s doctoral thesis, in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, explored the role of perceptions of corruption on the development of English crown institutions and included in-depth examinations of political poetry of the period. As part of his CHASE studentship he completed a four-month funded placement at the National Archives.
Jack utilises data science methodologies to collect, analyse, and visualise fourteenth century administrative records. He is interested in corruption, digital approaches to the study of the medieval period, Irish history, conceptions of authority, governance studies, football, and cricket.