Matthew Hermane is a PhD candidate whose primary focus is early modern Middle Eastern history. He is particularly interested in exploring travel and travel writing as a route for promoting transregional and transcultural studies as alternatives to the area studies model. His HASTAC project is inspired by his dissertation, which focuses on contemporaneous instances of French and Persian travel writing on Southeast Asia in the late-seventeenth century. For this project, he is building a prototype early modern travel database and mapping tool that might help users identify parallel historical accounts of different regional and linguistic origins to demonstrate how digital methods might encourage transregional and transcultural studies.