Chair and Vice-Chair of the OpenEdition Scientific Board

In September, the OpenEdition Scientific Board appointed its chairs: Michael Sinatra will chair the Scientific Board, while Karine Bennafla and François Bougard will be vice-chairs.

The main tasks of the Scientific Board are to develop open digital publishing in the humanities and social sciences, to participate in the strategic development of the OpenEdition platforms, and to oversee the scientific steering of the organization.

Michael Sinatra

Professor at the Université de Montréal, a specialist in British Romanticism and founder of the Centre de recherche sur les humanités numériques in Quebec, Michael Sinatra has over twenty years of research and management experience in the world of the digital humanities and digital publishing.

The creator of one of the first digital open access academic journals, Romanticism on the Net, created in February 1996 in Oxford while he was studying for his PhD, from 2007 to 2012 he led the pan-Canadian project Synergies, a research infrastructure for Canada’s humanities and social sciences funded through the National Platforms Program of the Canada Foundation for Innovation.

Michael Sinatra played a major role in the institutionalization of the digital humanities internationally by serving, from 2009 to 2015, as the French presidency of the Canadian Society of Digital Humanities (SCHN). A member of the steering sommittee of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (2011-2014) for three years, he went on to sit on the coordinating committee of Humanistica, the French-language international association for the digital humanities, since its creation in 2014 until 2019.

With Marcello Vitali-Rosati, in 2014 he founded the collection “Parcours numériques ” at the Presses de l’Université de Montréal, an open access hybrid collection that offers an enriched online version of its titles, and in which he published the Pratiques de l’édition numérique guide.

He currently leads the Research Group on Critical Editions in a Digital Context, funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture.

“OpenEdition is a leading organization in the world of scholarly publishing and one with an impressive history. It is an honour to serve as chair of the Scientific Board to support future developments and play a part in the current challenges of legitimizing academic content.”

Karine Bennafla

Karine Bennafla – Professor of Geography at Lyon III University. After a PhD on border trade in Central Africa, Karine Bennafla worked in Lebanon, and later in Morocco as a CNRS researcher (2007-2009). A junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France (2011), she was a visiting scholar at the University of Edinburgh (Center for African Studies) for two years. Her research interests focus on development, border areas, and the so-called informal urban economy. From 2015 to 2019 she was director of the CEDEJ (USR 3123) in Cairo, Egypt, where she was head of publishing.

François Bougard

François Bougard, a former director of medieval studies at the Ecole française de Rome (1997-2004), is professor of history of the Middle Ages at Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense University. He has been seconded to the CNRS as director of the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes (UPR 841) since September 2014.

A specialist of the High Middle Ages, he is the author of a thesis on the exercise of justice in the Kingdom of Italy between the eighth and eleventh century (published in 1995), and has published commented translations of authors of the Italian High Middle Ages (Paul Diacre, Liudprand of Cremona). His research also focuses on the history of libraries, with a particular interest in French Cistercian circles and, more recently, the manuscript collection of Cardinal Richelieu.

“My interest in OpenEdition is both personal and institutional. Open science is a new frontier for the development of our disciplines, some of which have already been crossed but others of which are still far away. It must also be reconciled with the practices and media in use, especially in traditional research centres, as is the case at the IRHT. It is in order to contribute to this collective challenge that I wanted to be part of the Scientific Board.”

Learn more about the membership of the Scientific Board

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