The Team
Principal Investigators
Maria Cristina Martinez-Juan
Maria Cristina Martinez-Juan has an M.A. in Museums, Heritage and Material Culture Studies from SOAS, University of London and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of the Philippines, Diliman. She taught as an Associate Professor at the Humanities Department of the University of the Philippines before she moved to New York then London in 2013.
Currently, she is a member of the faculty at the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at SOAS where she teaches its modules on Philippine Literature and Philippine Cultural Studies. She is the project head of Philippine Studies at SOAS, an interdisciplinary forum for Philippine-related teaching, research and cultural production in the UK. Currently, she is the Principal Investigator of two AHRC-funded digital humanities projects and is the project lead for the Mapping Philippine Material Culture project.
Project Role:
Dr. Cristina Martinez-Juan serves as the Principal Investigator for the project in the
United Kingdom. Her role is to identify and manage the aggregation of the baseline archival corpus, research on historical contexts as well as supervise its conversion into IIIF ready images. Using metadata from the various owning institutions, she will design the information architecture for the creation of the digital
reconstruction of the library, as well as create the interface for the publication of analyses,
exhibits and crowd-sourcing tools. She will also co-plan and co-organize with the US team, the
initial conference/workshop set to initiate the project and the final conference in which the project will be
showcased for an interdisciplinary and international public.
Christina H. Lee
Dr. Christina H. Lee is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. She is an early modernist whose work focuses on the literary and cultural productions of Iberian Spain and the Spanish Pacific. Her recent publications include: Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines of Early Spanish Rule (Oxford University Press, 2021), The Anxiety of Sameness in Early Modern Spain (Manchester University Press, 2015), The Spanish Pacific, 1521-1815: A Reader of Primary Sources (with Ricardo Padrón, Amsterdam University Press, 2020), the collection of essays Western Visions of Far East in a Transpacific Age (Routledge [Ashgate], 2012), and the Spanish edition of Lope de Vega’s Los mártires de Japón (Juan de la Cuesta, 2006). She is also the co-editor of the global history book series Connected Histories in Early Modern Europe (with Julia Schleck), at Amsterdam University Press.
Project Role:
Professor Christina H. Lee is the NEH Project Director. Professor Lee leads the production of the transcriptions and translations of the extant handwritten manuscripts that belonged in the Convent of San Pablo/San Agustín prior to the British occupation. To this end, she has assembled a team of scholars in the United States and in the Philippines. In the United States, she is working with Ph.D. students at Princeton whose work focuses on the Spanish Pacific. In the Philippines, she is mentoring, and training rising scholars to read and transcribe the contents of the archive, thanks to a subcontract with the History Department of the University of the Philippines and co-directorship of their faculty.
Co-Principal Investigators
Claudia Canale
Dr. Claudia Canale is the Head of Research Innovation Enterprise and Public Engagement, she oversees the design, costing, and delivery of a number of enterprise services resulting from research projects. These range from small digitisation philanthropic grants, to over two-million pound multi-year projects to install a new Collection Care and Digitisation centre together with upgrading the suite of environmental and security controls in the SOAS archives stores.
Project Role:
Dr. Claudia Canale serves as Co-Principal Investigator for this proposal on the UK
side. She will direct the Special Collections section of the SOAS University of London Library,
as well as its Digital Services to help formulate and coordinate the organization of digital objects,
creation and curation of metadata, and the publication of contextual information resulting from
the research and analysis of the Faculty researchers.
Research Partner Institutions
The Lilly Library, Indiana University
As the repository of the majority of the dispersed San Agustin library collection that has been identified by the research proponents, the Lilly Library is an active participant and partner in this project. As agreed, the Library will
- Scan its original documents, and produce more than 8000 images from the manuscripts identified by the proponents, at a IIIF adaptable resolution.
- Make these high-resolution scans available to the proponents for conversion into IIIF and allow them to make these images available from an external server.
- Provide access and share the metadata available in the Lilly Library’s special collections catalogue and internal databases.
- Administer the additional grants to supplement the Lilly’s short term fellowships with a specific study of the Philippine manuscripts.
- Participate in relevant project meetings, events and workshops and act in an advisory capacity for the project's progress.
San Agustin Library, Manila
The San Agustin Church is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and was built as it now stands in 1587. The monastery just adjacent to the church, was turned into a Museum in 1973 and continues to have the famous Biblioteca on the second floor. The San Agustin library has some remaining manuscripts from the period - but many of them have not been catalogued or digitized. As an institutional partner for this project the library will provide full access to researchers to study the remaining manuscripts and materials in the Library. It will also give access and share any photos or documentation about the library that may help in the digital reconstruction of the Library’s contents and also its history.
The Lopez Library, Manila
Lopez Museum and Library (LML) is the Philippines’ oldest privately owned and publicly accessible museum and library. In keeping with the vision of its founder, Eugenio Lopez, Sr., LML continues to be a key cultural and historical resource for Philippine arts and letters with a collection that spans 600 years through rare books, manuscripts, periodicals, maps, archives, precolonial potter, and 19th century to contemporary art. as an Associate Partner, the library will a) Scan approximately 1,500 leaves from the rare books identified by the proponents at an IIIF adaptable resolution b) Make these high-resolution scans available to the proponents for conversion into IIIF and allow them to serve up the images from an external server for academic research, c) Give access and share the relevant metadata available in LML’s database to facilitate academic research
Department of History, the University of the Philippines, Diliman
The UP Department of History belongs to the College of Social Sciences and Philosophy. It was founded on 3 June 1910 and is considered to be one of the oldest history departments in the country. Since 1915, the department has offered graduate courses for students taking further studies under the Master of Arts program.
The Department has identified two of its Faculty members to take the lead in the collaboration between 1762 archive project and the History Department of UP. This collaboration will focus on transcribing the identified manuscripts from the 1762 archive.
Ros Costelo is an Assistant Professor in the University of the Philippines Department of History. She obtained her Doctorado en Historia Contemporánea (mención internacional) and Master Interuniversitario en Historia Contemporánea degrees in the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She has is currently a Margarita Salas postdoctoral fellow in the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas and Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She finished BA History (2007) and MA History (2012) in the UP Department of History. Her research interests are Spanish colonial public works and engineering in the Philippines, techno-scientific network in the Spanish, British, and French empires, and diplomatic history.
Nicholas Sy is assistant professor at the Department of History, University of the Philippines Diliman. Currently on study leave, he is based at Radboud University Nijmegen where his is writing his dissertation under the supervision of Prof.dr. Jan Kok and dr. Dries Lyna—a project that combines cultural, social, and demographic history approaches to describe an intertwining of colonial and local forms of slavery. This dissertation is an Early Modern history of Indian Ocean encounters in an archipelago that was a vital link connecting Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic histories of slavery.
Associate Partner Institutions
The British Library
Annabelle Teh Gallop
Annabel Teh Gallop is head of the Southeast Asia section at the British Library, London. Her main research interests are in Malay manuscripts, letters, documents and seals, and the art of the Qur’an across the Indian Ocean world. Recent publications include ‘Qur’an manuscripts from Mindanao: collecting histories, art and materiality’, South East Asia Research, 2022, 30 (1): 23-67; ‘Malay documents from Sulu and Mindanao in the British Library’, Journal of Philippine local history & heritage. August 2016, 2 (2): 63-112; and Malay seals from the Islamic world of Southeast Asia (2019), a catalogue of over 2,000 seals from Southeast Asia inscribed in Arabic script. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2019.
Foyle Special Collections, King’s College
Katie Sambrook
Katie Sambrook is Head of Special Collections & Engagement (Libraries & Collections) at King’s College London. She holds degrees from the universities of Oxford, York and University College London and has worked at the University of Birmingham and at London Metropolitan Archives. Her career has been in rare books and special collections librarianship, and she has spoken and published widely on related topics, as well as serving on the committees of the Rare Books and Special Collections Group of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, the library and museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and SCOLMA (the UK group for librarians working with collections on Africa), among others. Katie’s involvement in this project stems from her interest in the library of linguistic scholar William Marsden (1754-1836), now at King’s, which contains volumes believed to have formed part of the San Pablo library.
