Dr Mirela Ivanova

I work on the intellectual and social history of Byzantium and Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages and am currently a Junior Research Fellow at University College, Oxford.

Research Interests

My research interests fall into three main tenents.

In the middle ages, my research explores written culture, literacy, multi-lingualism and cultural transmission across langauges and political contexts. I am concerned with how meaning is locally created and repurposed, and how medieval actors used textual production to seek to bring about changes in their socio-political circumstances. My docotral thesis, Inventing Slavonic: Cutlures of Writing between Rome and Constantinople, explored the earliest texts concerned with the invention of the Slavonic alphabet. It analysed how the alphabet continued to be contested, repurposed and re-invented in roughly the first century after its invention (ca.860-950), and how the changing context of its use in turn affected ideas about writing, script-creation and conversion more broadly.

Relatedly, my work explores the historiography of Byzantium and Central and Eastern Europe, and how nineteenth- and twentieth- century interpretations of medieval sources have been guided by nation-building projects, and continue to permeate scholarship as the often unquestioned commonsense assumtpions about medieval sources or people.

Most broadly still, I am interested in historical theory and the philosophy of history and their uses in the practice of history. To this end, I am a co-convenor of the TORCH Research Network ‘New Critical Approaches to the Byzantine World’, where I have led and co-organised events on Balkanism; hegemony and the sublatern; imperialism, colonialism and post-colonialism in the study of the Byzantine world; and the uses and possibilities of post-Butler gender theory for the study of the medieval world.