Ilia Curto Pelle

11/06/2026

By Ilia Curto PelleAfter sixteen months of online collaboration, four Ph.D. students based in Greece and Turkey visited the Seeger Center to share findings from a Princeton-led digital humanities project on medieval coins.On April 23, the students presented their research on late antique and early m...

13/05/2026

Since 2020, I have been a participant and member of the executive committee of the FLAME (Framing the Late Antique and early Medieval Economy) Project, a digital-humanities project that aims to study the economic transition between the end of the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages based on a database of what are now more than 2 million coins from the period 325-750. Over the past year, we launched a sub-project, named the FLAME Heartlands Project, and aimed at expanding our coverage of coin finds in the modern-day countries of Greece and Turkiye. As part of this initiative, we received a generous Magic Grant for Innovation from the Princeton Council for the Humanities to fund the work of four PhD students in Greece and Turkiye. The four students spent the past year inputting new coin finds from the two countries and also attempting to access unpublished materials. In doing so, they have both significantly expanded our dataset, but also encountered numerous bureaucratic, legal, and publication challenges. Our findings were presented during a couple of workshops at Princeton University and the American Numismatic Society in April 2026. The recording of the ANS iteration workshop, "Filling in the Blanks: Increasing the Representation of Late Antique and Early Medieval Coin Finds", is now available on their YouTube channel. If you are interested in seeing the results of our work, you can access the recording of the workshop by clicking on this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sw9akwxs4g&t=1s

I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my colleagues Alan Stahl, Lee Mordechai, and Mark Pyzyk, to the four students, Didem Dursun, Garyfallia Prifti, Rumeysa Olutas, and DIkaios Panteleakis, and to our host institutions and funders, in particular the American Numismatic Society, the Princeton Council for the Humanities, the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University, and the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity for making this project possible.

In episode 271 of our Long Table series, we'll look at Princeton University’s FLAME project (Framing the Late Antique and early Medieval Economy). It tracks ...

11/05/2026

Hello friends! I may have disappeared over the past year, but it was for a good reason. Since July of 2025, I have been preparing for my general examinations. The general examinations are qualifying exams that all second-year PhD students in History at Princeton University are supposed to take, in order to continue their progress towards the attainment of their PhD, and to be allowed to teach undergraduates. In my field, the expectation is that students are to read 200 books, culled from classic monographs, edited volumes, and conference proceedings in their major and secondary fields of study. So, I have been reading like crazy for an entire year and last week I finally sat my written exams. 5 days of writing and 12,000 words of papers later, I was supposed to defend my work in an oral examination with my advisors. I am happy to share with all of you that I not only passed my examination, but also was recommended for a distinction, a selective honor for the best performers in the examination. I would like to express my endless gratitude to my advisor, Professor Teresa Shawcross, as well as my supporters, mentors, and examiners professors Jack Tannous and Helmut Reimitz for supporting me during my preparation, and for always striving to cultivate my intellectual curiosity and to challenge me on my assumptions and arguments. I would also like to thank all of my family, friends, and colleagues who acted as my councilors and interlocutors over the past year, and I want to thank all of you for never giving up on my dreams of becoming an academic. Next step: Dissertation proposal, a summer seminar, and presenting at the biggest congress in Byzantine studies in August. But that is news that will be shared in another post.

14/06/2025

I may have disappeared form the online space for the past few months, but I have not been staying idle. And because they often say the best news comes in pairs… or threes… or more, I wanted to give all of you, my friends, followers, and supporters, an update about how the first year at Princeton has been going, and my news and plans for this exciting summer.
1. More publications – As I posted a little while ago, my fourth publication, co-written with my colleagues in the FLAME Project, came out in the journal Digital Humanities Quarterly (https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/19/1/000770/000770.html). Moreover, another four publications are in different stages of the pipeline (one has passed peer-review, one is submitted to peer-review, and yet another is about to be submitted to an academic journal), and I hope to be able to share more details as the pipelines come to their end.
2. A, A, A+ - My performance during the first academic year of my PhD in Princeton has been quite successful. While I was returning to a familiar place, the academic gap between undergraduate and graduate courses in the university is not insignificant. Thus, I am happy that my hard work and dedication was rewarded with the highest possible grades in all of the subjects I took this year, especially the A+ I received for my work in Coptic. I hope to continue this streak going into my second year. I also successfully prepared an independent paper on slavery in three legal documents from a Southern Italian monastery, which is currently under review by the History department, and which I hope to rework for publication in the future.
3. Language exams – Princeton requires its graduate students in pre-modern History to prove their proficiency in at least four languages (two ancient, two modern) through written exams. This year, I successfully passed my exams in Greek, Latin, German, French, and Old Church Slavonic, and I hope to continue this streak with exams in Coptic, Arabic, and Hebrew in the fall.
4. Summer Hebrew in Rome – Speaking of Hebrew, I am excited to share that this July I will be travelling for a month in Rome to study Biblical Hebrew at the Pontifical University, another language that will be valuable for my PhD work. Spending time in Rome will also enable me to create meaningful contacts with Italian colleagues in Byzantine studies and numismatics, which I hope to cultivate and preserve for the future.
5. FLAME – I have also continued my work on the FLAME Project as its Project Manager. In this capacity, I manage a team of undergraduate students digitizing published coin finds from important numismatic journals and monograph. Several individual and joint publications are in the works, as well as the preparation of a digital cookbook that should allow users to produce FLAME-like visualizations with the use of their own data.
6. Hybrid Qur’ans from Southeast Asia – This past year, I began working together with Professor Michael Cook on a project studying hybrid Qur’ans from Southeast Asia. Our project investigates different recitation traditions, imported into 16th and 17th-century Malaysia, Indonesia, and Philippines from places as diverse as India, the Maghrib, and the Middle East. The project will culminate in an online workshop on August 14th.
7. Towards Vienna – I am also happy to share that next year I have been approved to participate at the International Byzantine Congress in Vienna, Austria. This Congress takes place once every 6 years and brings together scholars working on Byzantine studies from all over the world. I will participate as part of a panel dedicated to the history of the Greek region of Epiros in the 12th-14th centuries.
These positive developments in my young academic career would be impossible without the aid of my family, mentors, and friends. Thanks to all of you for all the good words, encouragement, and support, and I hope to be in touch soon with even more good news.

01/06/2025

I am pleased to share that my fourth academic article is now officially published in the new issue of the journal Digital Humanities Quarterly! The paper, entitled "Systematic bias in humanities datasets: ancient and medieval coin finds in the FLAME project," was co-authored with my colleagues on the FLAME Project Lee Mordechai, Alan Stahl, and Mark Pyzyk. It draws on FLAME's decade-long experience in the field of digital humanities to examine the biases that underpin both FLAME and digital humanities projects at large. The digital humanities revolution was undertaken with the promise that, by using digital tools like online databases and more recently AI, humanities scholars can make new and groundbreaking research that was based on objectively accumulated data. Numbers, after all, don't lie. But the people who write them down might. After a decade of work on FLAME, we have encountered a number of biases, ancient and modern, intentional and unintentional, regional and methodological, that have so far prevented us from achieving our goal of reconstructing the economy of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. In publishing a discussion of these biases and the solutions we have undertaken to address them, we hope to raise awareness and initiate a more serious conversation within the field of digital humanities about best practices about addressing these different biases on both an individual project- and field-wide level. I would like to express my special gratitude to my co-authors and colleagues on the FLAME Project for allowing me to contribute to this publication and for their continuous support for my young academic career. If you would like to take a look at our article, please click on the following link:

FLAME is an online digital humanities project providing economic data for investigations of the transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages (CE 325-750) in Western Eurasia and North Africa. While accumulating, entering, and displaying the data, the project’s leadership has become incre...

18/02/2025

They often say that good things come in pairs. A couple of months ago I had posted that my master's thesis from the University of Oxford on 13th-century Byzantine-style imitative coins in the Northern Balkans was awarded the OCBR Graduate Prize for Best Master’s Thesis in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies. Last week I got a further piece of good news. In addition to my master's thesis, my performance in the classroom and examinations of the MPhil in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies was recognized with the "Best Performance in Cohort Prize" from the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford. I would especially want to thank my supervisors, Professors Ida Toth and Julian Baker, for all of their support for me during my MPhil in Oxford, as well as to my teachers, in particular Mike Humphreys, Phil Booth, Tim Penn, and Yuhan Vevaina for their generosity in terms of knowledge they conferred upon me and for their patience in dealing with my many (and often overbearing) questions. It feels incredible to know when your hard work is recognized, especially from a university as renowned and prestigious as that of Oxford. Soon, I hope to be in the position of posting about such prizes from my time as a PhD student at Princeton University, as well as other updates for all of you who have always supported me on my journey to acquiring more and more knowledge about the people of the past.

25/01/2025

15/01/2025

Since Monday of this week, I have been participating in the two-week Princeton University Graduate Student workshop on “Coin Production and Circulation in Byzantine Greece and Anatolia, 325-750“ at the Princeton Athens Center in Athens, Greece. The goal of this workshop is to bring together graduate students from Princeton, Greece, and Turkey to investigate the archaeological, academic, and legal formation processes impacting the publication of Late Antique coin finds in modern Greece and Turkey. This is a unique chance for me to build networks with early career scholars in these two countries, to access incredible archives like the coins from the Agora and Corinth excavation, as well as the collection of the Numismatic Museum in Athens, and to consider the potential for new initiatives for the cataloging and digitization of unpublished or inaccessible excavations and hoards. I would like to express my gratitude to the FLAME Project, my teacher, Professor Alan Stahl, and the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University for the opportunity to participate in this workshop and I am excited for the perspectives for the future of digital numismatics projects that this workshop could contribute to.

29/10/2024

Dreams do come true, if you pour your heart into making them come true and if you have a powerful support group that helps you achieve them. As many of you know, back in June of 2024, I completed my MPhil in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at the University of Oxford. Today, I received the incredible news that my masters thesis on the Phenomenon of Imitative Coinages in the 12th- and 13-th-century Balkans has been awarded the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research's Award for Best Masters Thesis. The OCBR is the most important organisation for the promotion and funding of Byzantine research in Oxford and, by extension, arguably in all of the United Kingdom. This award means more to me than its monetary value: it is a recognition of all the painstaking work that I put into researching my thesis, including visiting Regional History Museums all across Bulgaria and cataloguing their holdings of Medieval coins; it is a testament to the incredible support I have been offered by my wonderful advisors, professors Ida Toth and Julian Baker, as well as by my family, friends, and colleagues; and, finally, it is an important stepping stone for the progression of my career as a scholar in the field of the Late Antique and Medieval Economy. Thank you once again to all of you for your unwavering support for me and I hope to share even more great news during the course of my PhD in History at Princeton University.

14/09/2024

I am extremely happy to share that my third academic publication, a book review of Zhenya Zhekova and Stela Doncheva's recent monograph "Production of imitative Byzantine folles in the First Bulgarian Kingdom", just came out in the University of Munster's journal "The Byzantine Review." I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Dr. Georgi Parpulov, who gave me the opportunity of preparing a book review for this wonderful piece of Bulgarian academic scholarship, and Zhenya Zhekova, for giving me electronic access to the publication due to its limited number of printed copies. The book review can be accessed at the following link: