Dr. Drew Thomas is a historian specializing in early modern material culture, with a particular focus on the history of communication in the Holy Roman Empire during the Protestant Reformation and German Renaissance. He is currently a Science Foundation Ireland – Irish Research Council Pathway Programme Fellow in the School of History at University College Dublin where he leads a digital humanities project on religious visual communication.
Education
He completed his Bachelor’s degree at Saint Louis University in 2010 with a degree in Theology and Philosophy. He then earned a Master’s degree in Theological Studies at Harvard Universtity in 2012. This was followed by his PhD in History at the University of St Andrews in 2018.
Research Interests
With a deep-rooted curiosity in the early modern printing industry, Dr. Thomas is interested in the multifaceted aspects of this field, including design, manufacturing, counterfeiting and reception. He uses digital humanities methodologies to study printing at scale and applies artificial intelligence to investigate illustrations and ornaments.
Current Project
His current project, “Visualizing Faith: Print, Piety and Propaganda”, aims to use artificial intelligence to help classify and investigate how religious groups used visual communication in their propaganda and devotional literature during times of conflict and turmoil. As its corpus, the project relies upon the Ornamento image repository, a resource created with Professor Alexander Wilkinson, which identified over 5.6 million illustrations and ornaments used in early modern printing across Europe up to 1600. The project is funded by the SFI-IRC grant “Applying Artificial Intelligence to the Printing Press: Transforming Visual Communication During the Protestant Reformation”.
Recent Publication
He recently published The Industry of Evangelism: Printing for the Reformation in Martin Luther’s Wittenberg (Brill, 2022), a monograph exploring how the small Saxon town at the heart of Luther’s movement rose to become the largest publishing industry in the Holy Roman Empire. Furthermore, it meticulously explores the role of counterfeiting in the dissemination of Luther’s ideas, emphasizing how fraud within the Reformation printing industry played a pivotal role.
Exhibition Curation
Dr. Thomas has had the privilege of serving as a guest curator for exhibitions focusing on early modern printing and counterfeiting. These exhibitions were held at prestigious institutions such as the John Rylands Research Institute and Library at the University of Manchester, the Reformation History Research Library in Wittenberg, Germany, and the Pitts Theology Library at Emory University in the USA. These curated exhibitions showcase Drew Thomas’s expertise and his ability to engage audiences through thought-provoking historical narratives.
