Guest Contributor, Middle Eastern Studies
Mohamed Ilyes Mechentel holds a Bachelor’s degree in Humanities from the Université de Rouen Normandie, renowned for its specialization in Roman and Greek civilization. His academic background spans multiple disciplines, including History, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, and Political Science.
He recently graduated with a Master’s degree in ‘Digital Technologies Applied to History’ from the prestigious École des Chartes, where he focused on the scientific challenges of processing historical sources through digital technologies. During his studies, he completed an internship at the Bibliothèque universitaire des langues et civilisations (BULAC), where he worked with digital tools applied to Arabic texts. He also interned at the Louvre Museum, focusing on the application of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technologies to 19th-century sources. Additionally, he contributed to the CallFront project at the Institut National d’Histoire des Arts, which aims to collect and analyze scriptural data from the Islamic world.
Mohamed Ilyes Mechentel is currently a Research Associate and Digital Humanities expert in Islamic Studies at the University of Bern (since February 2025). He contributes to major projects such as TraIL (Tracing Labour in Islamicate Legal Traditions), MediMath and The Flow.
The Digital Orientalist 