Sarah A. Lang

I have a Dr. phil. in Digital Humanities and I am Head of Digital Humanities at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin. In addition, I am a guest professor for Digital Humanities at Bergische Universität Wuppertal in 2026. Previously I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Digital Humanities at the University of Graz (Austria, 2021-2025).

After completing undergraduate and graduate degrees in History and Classics (Latin & Greek) in Graz (including an Erasmus stay in Montpellier), I transitioned into the field of Digital Humanities (DH), and have been working on projects in this field for more than 10 years. My PhD research, at the intersection of Digital Humanities and the early modern history of science, introduced computational methods into the history of alchemy. It focused on decoding cryptographical stylistic devices specific to alchemy (Decknamen) by drawing on the case study of chymist Michael Maier’s (1568-1622) Neo-Latin corpus. I was funded by a competitive University of Graz bursary during my PhD (2018-2021) and I won the Bader Prize for the History of Science (Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2021) for my PhD thesis.

In 2023, I was elected into the board of directors of the German Digital Humanities Association (DHd), in which I also co-lead the Critical Digital Humanities working group. I am also a council member and web content editor of the {Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (SHAC)](https://ambix.org/). I have been a fellow at several prestigious institutions in the U.S., Germany, and Austria.

I was involved in decrypting an alchemical cipher that has led me to continue exploring what I call occult cryptography. Our story was picked up by the media and adapted into a play by French playwright Benoit Solès, Le secret des secrets (Paris 2025).

My interdisciplinary publications range across the history of science, alchemy and chymistry, historical cryptography, and the Digital and Computational Humanities, demonstrating a long-standing commitment to pushing the boundaries between computational methods of the Digital Humanities and the historiography of alchemy.

I am known for my blog LaTeX Ninja’ing and the Digital Humanities where I teach DH. I have taught 30+ classes in DH and history of knowledge at the Universities of Wuppertal, Graz, Passau and Vienna. I was PI in two projects, creating the video self-learning classes Digitizing the Materiality of the Pre-Modern Book & Computer Vision for Digital Humanists and have previously worked as a Digital Humanities research assistant in the GRaF (Graz Repository of Ancient Fables (2017-2019) and Spectators (2016-2017) projects.