Barbara Williams Ellertson, Co-Director
After four decades as a designer of scholarly books, Barbara Williams Ellertson is now an independent researcher in the history of printing as portrayed in Renaissance art. This current work is a return to early interests: she earned a B.A. from Duke University with majors in history and religion. BW&A Books, the studio she founded in 1988 continues to provide services to a wide range of publishing clients. Two design projects for Cornell University Press on manuscript studies helped inspire Barbara’s interest in the BASIRA Project: Introduction to Manuscript Studies by Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Cornell, 2007; and Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches, by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, et al., Cornell, 2012.
A trip to Florence on a press check provided the initial insight that led to the formation of the BASIRA Project in 2014. Barbara’s experience with several generations of technical change within contemporary book publishing provides interesting perspectives on some of the cultural transformations wrought by technology in Western culture. In addition to extensive self-directed research, she has studied at Rare Book School in courses from Michelle Brown, Peter Stallybrass, Eric White, Paul Needham; she also attended the 2023 Ligatus Summer School in Barcelona.
Deeply involved with all aspects of the BASIRA Project, Barbara made presentations recently at the Early Book Society conference at NYU; she co-hosted a panel at the 2025 meeting of the Renaissance Society of America. She is also looking forward to BASIRA’s future development into a fully inter-operable resource of linked open data.
Nicholas Herman, Co-Director
Art historian Nicholas Herman joined the BASIRA Project in 2019; he was co-PI with Ellertson on the Samuel H. Kress Digital Art History grant, 2020-2021. As the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Curator at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies and Medieval Studies Librarian at Penn Libraries, Nicholas’ teaching and research focus on manuscript illumination and its intersection with other media in fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century Europe.
Nicholas received his doctorate in 2014 from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; his dissertation focused on the French Renaissance court painter, Jean Bourdichon. His books include Le livre enluminé, entre représentation et illusion (2018), Making the Renaissance Manuscript: Discoveries from Philadelphia Libraries (2020), and, co-written with Anne-Marie Eze, Bourdichon’s Boston Hours (2021). In Spring 2020 he was Craig Hugh Smyth Fellow at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti.
Nicholas’ administrative initiative expedited the alliance between the Schoenberg Institute and the BASIRA Project. In addition to being deeply involved in re-developing the database, he continues in development work to assure the future of the Project.
Douglas Emery, Technical Advisor
Special Collections Digital Content Programmer, Doug oversees data operations for SIMS and provides programming, supervisory, and consultative support for most of SIMS’s digital projects, including the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts and Penn Libraries’ OPenn website (http://openn.library.upenn.edu). He is the architect and manager of OPenn, a site that hosts full-resolution images of 15,000 books and manuscripts from thirty-five collections and repository in the U.S. and England. Doug has been an integral part of all the planning and digital strategy involved in re-designing the BASIRA database for its open-access operation at Penn since 2019.
Doug’s educational background is in religious studies, English and American literature, and languages and literature of the Ancient Near East.
Zofia Załęska, Content Specialist 
Zofia is an assistant curator at the National Museum in Warsaw, and is completing a PhD in art history at the University of Warsaw. Zofia’s research examines the role of images of dance in medieval manuscript illumination. Recently, she served as a Fulbright Research Fellow at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, and she has been instrumental in assisting with data cleanup and content enrichment as BASIRA enters its launch phase. Read more about Zofia’s recent stay in Philadelphia in this blog post from Penn Libraries.
Content Team
Sophia Adams is a PhD Candidate at The Courtauld Institute of Art. She served as the BASIRA visiting intern at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at Penn in the Fall of 2024, funded by a CHASE consortium grant. During her time in Philadelphia, she conducted reviews of document format and type categories and created hundreds of new Artwork records. She also worked on documenting the BASIRA schema and glossary. Her research concerns fifteenth-century English manuscript rolls.
Joanna Blaz has worked as a writer and editor in higher education for nearly 10 years, currently for the Wharton School at Penn. She grew up in Florida, where she obtained a bachelor’s in Journalism with a minor in History and a master’s in Mass Communications. With roots in Poland, she’s always had a deep interest in European and renaissance-era history, which sparked her interest in BASIRA. During the summer, you can find her roaming art museums across Europe and the U.S., on the hunt for her next BASIRA entry.
Ava Chapman is a Senior Undergraduate at Wellesley College, majoring in Classics. She is an avid book historian, letterpress printer, and bookbinder. As a Research Fellow with BASIRA, she is excited to draw new connections between text, image, and historical processes.
Kaitlynn Gilmore is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in Art History. Her love for manuscripts began while working on her honors thesis about depictions of carved gems in Italian Renaissance manuscripts. She looks forward to continuing her study of Renaissance book production and decoration as a Content Specialist with BASIRA.
Nancy (Ines) Golsan is retired from teaching Latin in middle school, high school and university. She resides in Bryan, Texas. Together with Edith Keene, she is undertaking a comprehensive review of Latin transcriptions and their English translations in the BASIRA database.
Edith Keene is a retired Latin teacher who resides in Durham, North Carolina. Together with Nancy Golsan, she is undertaking a review of Latin diplomatic transcriptions, expanded transcriptions, and translations in the BASIRA database.
Bailey Ludwig is the Administrative Program Manager for Transforming Stories, Spaces, Lives (TSSL), a Mellon-funded project at Wellesley College. She received her PhD in English from Brandeis University in 2024, with research focusing on Arthurian Romance, critical eating studies, and medieval manuscripts. Bailey’s work on Houghton Library’s Material Features site and review of their Early Books and Manuscripts sparked her interest in volunteering for BASIRA. Her own interest in teaching book history and making medieval manuscripts more publicly accessible aligns with BASIRA’s mission to provide a resource for researching, teaching, and learning about medieval and renaissance book history. In Fall 2025, TSSL will be hiring a student research fellow to work with Bailey on the BASIRA project.
Iris Peron-Ames is a Junior Undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in Art History. She is currently the BASIRA Project Assistant, contributing to content verification and creation procedures.
Emma Le Poidevin is a masters student of Medieval History at the Université de Poitiers, currently researching failed canonisation procedures in the 14th century. Her work with hagiographic manuscripts has fueled her interest in BASIRA and learning more about medieval book-binding techniques.
Ana Tourais is a book and paper conservator and researcher, residing in Lisbon, Portugal. As a specialist in medieval bookbindings, she finds that work with BASIRA offers the opportunity to explore structures that closely align with the historical objects of her practice, helping establish connections that aid in dating and contextualizing them more comprehensively.
Early Collaborators
Janet K. Seiz
Graduating in 1982 from Case Western Reserve University with a M.A. in Renaissance Art History, Janet Seiz’s object-oriented approach to art history was formed by the program’s close cooperation with the Cleveland Museum of Art. Experiences from a series of collections-based seminars with objects from the CMA’s collections positioned the centrality of the object in Seiz’s early work, and it remains so decades later. Janet contributed foundational conceptual work to the early phases of the BASIRA Project, and continues to advise the BASIRA team.
Andrea Zietlow
A native of Bonn, Germany, Andrea earned her PhD in Chemistry from the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität. After a career in corporate communications, she founded a studio where she creates and binds elegant artist’s books. Along with her work in helping plan the revised structure for the BASIRA database, Andrea contributed hundreds of photographs gathered during her travels, and completed several hundred database entries. The BASIRA team remains indebted to her for her substantive contributions.
