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 and Peter Stallybrass and at the Ligatus Summer School in Barcelona.
Deeply involved with all aspects of the BASIRA Project, Barbara is making presentations in the spring of 2024 at the Renaissance Society of America, the Vassar College & RGME symposium, and at the International Medieval Congress. 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.
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.
