Werner Stangl

Werner Stangl received his PhD in History at the University of Graz, Austria, in 2008. His thesis, on transatlantic Spanish emigrant letters in the colonial era, was published as a monography in 2012. He worked for a decade as an editor of a scholarly research journal, the Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas/Anuario de Historia de Latino América. After his PhD, his research focus shifted towards database design, digital editions ,and geographic information systems. One relevant output of this work was the edition and analysis of a notable early modern library of more than 8000 books and hundreds of manuscripts collected by an ambassador for the Habsburg dynasty in Switzerland in the early 1700s. From 2014 to 2019, Werner Stangl was the leader of the project HGIS de las Indias – a spatio-temporal infrastructure for Spanish Bourbon America, 1701-1808. In this project, he and his team reconstructed the development of settlements and territorial reforms of the Spanish Empire in the Americas and gathered much data related to those places and territories, such as economic, educational and cultural institutions, or population numbers. With his appointment as a visiting scholar at the Digital Tokugawa Lab, “Spatial Humanities” now definitely rivals “Latin American Studies” as a prime field of his expertise.