Michael J. Kelly, Ph.D., is a recent Fulbright Fellow to Ireland (2022) and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Hamburg in Germany (2021), and currently faculty in the Department of Judaic Studies at Binghamton University, SUNY. He was formerly an Associate Lecturer in History at the University of York (UK) and a Visiting Professor of History at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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Dr. Kelly’s research operates at the intersection of history, religion and theology, and the emergent interdisciplinary field of Bitcoin Studies. At the core of his work is the examination of how humans connect the abstract to the real and how/why we assign meaning and value both to the products of that union and the processes by which it is achieved. A current research project of his is the examination of the first dual fungible/non-fungible minted currencies and how that informs our understanding of currency, value, and humanness.

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Dr. Kelly has led numerous research events related to the study of value and currency, at the American Numismatic Society and elsewhere, and is currently developing America’s first comprehensive Bitcoin education program, at Binghamton University and in partnership with Foundry Digital. He is also a developer in Bitcoin and in his courses students experiment with how Bitcoin could revolutionize the Digital Humanities, decentralize the writing of History, and elicit unprecedented modes of sovereign consensus.