Dr Hugh Houghton has been appointed as Director of ITSEE from 1st October 2017. 

Following the move of Professor David Parker to stepped retirement, the current Deputy Director of ITSEE, Dr Hugh Houghton, has taken on the responsibility of Director of the Institute. ITSEE was founded in 2005 by Professor Parker and Dr Peter Robinson (now Professor at the University of Saskatoon), building on the University of Birmingham's Centre for Editing Texts in Religion. Over the last twelve years, ITSEE has been home to major research projects funded by the AHRC, JISC, British Academy and European Research Council, and numerous doctoral students working on editions of manuscripts and texts using the pioneering software and editing facilities developed by ITSEE. Particular highlights include the Codex Sinaiticus Project, Dr Alba Fedeli's work on Qur'anic Manuscripts in the Mingana Collection, the Editio Critica Maior of the Gospel according to John, and the COMPAUL Project. In recent years, ITSEE has also welcomed visiting postdoctoral researchers from Spain and Brazil for extended placements, and developed collaborative relationships with research teams in Germany, France, Ireland and the USA. 

Dr Houghton, who has been Deputy Director of ITSEE since 2010, said:

I have been fortunate to have been involved with ITSEE since its inception. It has been a unique and incredibly productive place to work, and I am hugely grateful to David Parker and Peter Robinson for their effort in establishing this Institute and making it such a welcoming and exciting place to be. ITSEE now has a global reputation in the field of Digital Editing, and I look forward to continuing to work with our range of international collaborators, as well as those closer to home, to create resources which will be of long-term scholarly value. I would also like to congratulate David Parker on his move to partial retirement, but I am very glad that he is not leaving us completely and will still be involved with several research projects. 

Professor Parker will continue to work on the Editio Critica Maior of the Gospel according to John, the ERC Advanced Grant Multimedia Yasna project, and the AHRC Codex Zacynthius Project. As Professor of Digital Philology, he also continues to head up the Birmingham Digital project with Professor Jean-Baptiste Cazier of the Centre for Computational Biology.

Hugh Houghton and David Parker at a recent graduation ceremony in Birmingham

Graduation ceremony