Michael A. Conrad

Michael A. Conrad is a cultural historian and digital humanist who holds a doctoral degree in Cultural History and Theory from Humboldt University of Berlin. He is a member of the Digital Society Initiative (DSI) at the University of Zurich, where he explores the intersection of historical research, game studies, and computational methods. In parallel, he teaches courses on the sociology of games and programming for humanities students at the University of St. Gallen and the University of Konstanz.

Research interests:

• Game Studies: historical and contemporary analysis of games as cultural artefacts
• Game-based Learning & Research: leveraging games for educational and investigative purposes
• Digital Humanities & Computational Methods: applying Python, R, SQL, data visualisation and AI to humanistic questions
• Medieval Cultural History: especially the role of games in modelling uncertainty in medieval military, economic and cosmological contexts
• Iberian Cultural History & Transculturality: studying cross-cultural exchanges in historical Iberia
• Decision Theory: theoretical frameworks informing strategic and probabilistic thinking

His current projects combine these interests by using modern data-analytic techniques to interrogate historical corpora and game artefacts, thereby opening new methodological avenues in both game studies and medieval studies.

Teaching & Outreach:
Michael is scheduled to teach a course on the "Sociology of Games" at the University of St. Gallen and to deliver practical programming instruction in Python for humanities students at the University of Konstanz.