Yanchen Liu is a Ph.D. candidate (Medieval Christianity) in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. His interest centers on the Romano-canonical judicial thinking and legal-commentarial literature in the High Middle Ages. His research investigates the glosses to thirteenth-century canonical texts, especially Bernard of Parma’s Glossa ordinaria to the Decretales of Pope Gregory IX, on the religious-legal issues around people living on the boundary of medieval Christianity – apostates, converts, heretics, Jews, magicians, Muslims, pagans, etc. He has been awarded the 2018-2019 Vatican Film Library Mellon Fellowship, the 2019-2020 Mellon Humanities International Travel Fellowship, and the 2020 Heckman Stipend (Hill Museum and Manuscript Library) for his dissertation research.
Having worked as an electronic research assistant at the Digital Humanities Center of the Columbia University Libraries during 2017-2019, he is also interested in Digital Humanities, especially the digital cataloging and editing of Medieval Latin manuscripts.