Jesse W. Torgerson is Associate Professor of Medieval Studies and History and the Chair of the College of Letters at Wesleyan University. He studies and teachers on exchange & interaction between the societies and cultures of Europe and the Mediterranean basin across the Middle Ages. His recent publications include The Chronographia of George the Synkellos and Theophanes: The Ends of Time in Ninth-Century Constantinople, a new account of the ninth-century history of the universe, the Chronographia of George the Synkellos and Theophanes as a manifesto for revolt against the Roman emperor (available as an Open Access publication) and two articles on new terminology for the practice of history in the digital era, and on collaborative work with Wesleyan students on the Constantinople as Palimpsest project (which produced a three-week unit for AP World History).

Professor Torgerson is a founding member (with Adam Franklin-Lyons, Emerson College, and David Gary Shaw, Wesleyan University) of the Traveler’s Lab, a multi-campus, international research hub for scholars and students interested in using "digital" tools and methods to analyze the movement of information (news, messages, knowledge) and the people and networks that carried them around the world before the advent of industrial travel. The lab is housed at at Wesleyan University and was established in partnership with Wesleyan’s Quantitative Analysis Center. Dr. Torgerson projects at the Traveler’s Lab include Constantinople as Palimpsest, which presents Wesleyan students’ work to catalogue the surviving traces of medieval Constantinople, and Narrative and Geography in the Chronicle of Theophanes, which uses digital tools to evaluate the hypothesis that the Chronicle would have constructed a narrative plot in the minds of its readers.