Dr. Michael Gervers

Biography

Michael Gervers has been teaching Art History at the University of Toronto since 1976, following a tenure as an Assistant Professor at New York University. He became a Full Professor in 1984 and was recognized as a Killam Fellow in 1975. Gervers founded the D.E.E.D.S Project (Documents Early England Data Set), which focuses on the study of medieval English property exchange documents and charters. His extensive publication record includes the authorship and editorship of eighteen books and seventy-five articles that cover various aspects of medieval history, art history, archaeology, textile history, and ethnography. Gervers has developed an online, searchable database that includes 11,000 property-transfer documents from late eleventh century to 1307. In collaboration with statistics experts, he has worked on algorithms to establish accurate chronological determinants for these documents. His research contributions extend to mentoring PhD students and participating in projects such as Digging Data (DiD) and ChartEx, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC). Gervers is also the founder and director of the Central Inner Asia Seminar (CIAS), establishing the Mazgaba Se’elet project, which online catalogs 65,000 photographs of Ethiopian art and culture. He teaches courses like Cultural History of Ethiopia at UTSC and is currently involved in a project to digitize manuscript collections from a 15th-century Ethiopian monastery.

Research Interests