Seshat: Global History Databank

Harvey Whitehouse Harvey Whitehouse is chair of Social Anthropology, Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, and a Professorial Fellow of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford. Harvey is one of the founders of the cognitive science of religion field. He is especially well known for his theory of “modes of religiosity” that has been the subject of extensive critical evaluation and testing by anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, cognitive scientists, and evolutionary theorists. In recent years, Harvey’s work has expanded beyond religion to examine the role of rituals of all kinds in binding groups together and motivating inter-group competition, including warfare. This research has become increasingly global in reach with ongoing data collection in Singapore, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Vanuatu, Brazil, the U.S., Spain, Cameroon, the U.K., Turkey, and Libya.

Kevin C. Feeney Kevin Feeney is a computer scientist in the Knowledge and Data Engineering Group, School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

Pieter François Dr. Pieter Francois is a Lecturer in Digital History at the University of Hertfordshire. His work focuses on travel and migration in the nineteenth century and on the evolution of social complexity, ritual and warfare. Together with Professor Peter Turchin and Professor Harvey Whitehouse he founded the Seshat Databank project in 2011. In 2013 he won the British Library Labs competition with his Sample Generator for Digitized Texts. He is also the Research Coordinator of the Cultural Evolution Lab at the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford.

Thomas Currie Thomas Currie is a Senior Lecturer at the Cultural Evolution Centre for Ecology & Conservation Biosciences the University of Exeter and is the Thematic Editor for Resources for the Seshat databank.