Who We Are

Lead Editor

Jenny Reddish is Seshat's Lead Editor and has been with the project since 2016. She is the co-editor of the Seshat History of the Axial Age (Hoyer and Reddish 2019) and the Seshat History of Moralizing Religion (Larson, Reddish and Turchin, forthcoming). Her background is in archaeology and anthropology.

Lead Research Assistant

Enrico Cioni has worked as a Research Assistant for Seshat: Global History Databank since January 2015 across a range of projects, usually involving religion and ritual. His background is in Archaeology and Anthropology.

Lead Historical Researcher

Samantha is a historian, researcher, and writer with an MA in Public History. Her specialist areas of study include the social history of Britain, seventeenth century Europe, and public engagement in history and heritage. Samantha has worked for the Seshat: Global History Databank since 2019 and, as the lead researcher on the Crisis Database project, has spent the last two years studying periods of intense crisis throughout history and how they relate to modern considerations of polycrisis. 

Senior Data Scientist

James Bennett is associate faculty at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna. Since 2015 he has been a part of Seshat: Global History Databank. His research investigates the dynamics of human history, modeling in particular the rise, spread, and fall of societies, from the Neolithic to the modern. Prior to this he was Vice President of Recommendation Systems at Netflix and responsible for the Netflix Prize.

Data Scientist

Majid Benam is passionate about data analysis and believes that answers to many of the big questions surrounding the rise and fall of historical empires are hidden in the datasets already available. He serves as the Database Administrator and Web Developer for 'Seshat: Global History Databank' at the Complexity Science Hub, Vienna. Majid has helped develop a user-friendly platform (seshat-db.com) that enables experts and the public to access and explore a wide range of historical data.

Data Scientist

Dániel Kondor is a postdoctoral researcher at the Complexity Science Hub, Vienna, working on large-scale, agent-based models of interactions among historical societies. His broader research interests include data-driven and agent-based modeling of complex social, economical, and technological phenomena, and understanding the effects of technological change on societies.

Research Officer

Rachel Ainsworth is a modern historian and researcher who completed her PhD in 2020 in the History Department at the University of East Anglia. Rachel has been working with Seshat Global History Databank since 2019. Her research focuses on historical conflict and crises in order to understand and navigate our current global complexities.  

Research Assistant

Jakob Zsambok is a Research Assistant who believes that the key to understanding the present lies in the past. He is interested in identifying general laws of history and working with large datasets. Since 2023, he has worked with Seshat: Global History Databank and contributed to Cliopatria - A geospatial database of world-wide political entities from 3400BCE to 2024CE.

Research Assistant

Jakob Hauser has been for the Seshat Global History Databank since March 2023. Jakob works with Maria del Rio-Chanona and Dániel Kondor on evaluating the historical knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) using the Seshat Databank and on developing approaches to use LLMs to automate aspects of Seshat's future data collection efforts. Jakob is currently pursing his  masters’s degree artificial intelligence at JKU Linz.

Research Software Engineer

Ed Chalstrey is a Research Data Scientist working in the Research Engineering Group at The Alan Turing Institute in London. Starting work on the Seshat Global History Databank in late 2023, he has worked to integrate the Cliopatria polity borders dataset into the website via the development of interactive maps. He has also worked to provide general software engineering support to the project alongside colleagues at Turing and CSH. Ed's research background is as a computational biologist, but his role at Turing has seen him work on data science and software engineering projects in a variety of fields. Seshat has been the first history and humanities project Ed has worked on. 'I’ve learned a lot and it’s been great fun!'

Research Application Manager

Kalle Westerling is a trained theatre historian who transitioned into a career as a Research Software Engineer in digital humanities projects before joining The Alan Turing Institute as a Research Application Manager, facilitating the application and impact of research through technical and strategic collaboration. On the Seshat project, he is responsible for building interoperability through an API, as well as conducting code and documentation review.

Senior Research Community Manager

André Piza is Senior Research Community Manager for the Arts and Humanities at the Alan Turing Institute. Within the Data-Culture project, Andre is working on various initiatives to develop the UK’s computational research capacity for the Arts and Humanities, including on indigenous communities data management policy for Seshat.

He joined the Turing in 2018 to manage Living with Machines, an Arts and Humanities Research Council strategic investment in Digital Humanities. Previously, he has managed major international creative and research projects at People’s Palace Projects, an arts research centre based at Queen Mary University of London where he also worked as Knowledge Exchange Manager for the Creative Industries across the university. His work there included collaborating with arts organizations, policy institutions, and independent artists and activists.

He has written about cultural exchange practice in The Art of Cultural Exchange (2019) and is an Organiser of the Turing’s AI&Arts interest group, a community of over 400 researchers, practitioners and policymakers working in the intersection of all arts disciplines and data science.

Postdoctoral Researcher

Matilda is a physicist and data scientist that recently entered the field of cliodynamic. Her PhD was in the field of quantum computing where she explored new type of qubits and developed data analysis and software tools for herself and her team. As a part of the Seshat team she is studying power transitions and the role of geography in the spread of historical innovation.