Adam Shear won a Renaissance Society of America Digital Innovation Award

Adam Shear, associate professor in Pitt’s Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, worked on a project that won a Digital Innovation Award from the Renaissance Society of America (RSA).

Footprints, a database that tracks the circulation of early modern Hebrew and Jewish books, was recognized for its excellence in supporting the study of the Renaissance. The open-source and open-access tool follows texts from their origins in the printing house to the present-day.

Shear, who is chair of the Department of Religious Studies, co-directed the project with peers from the Jewish Theological Seminary, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. He is the second Pitt faculty affiliated with the Early Modern Worlds Initiative to win an RSA prize in as many years — Associate Professor Christopher Nygren earned the 2022 Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize for best book in Renaissance studies.