Dr Mirela Ivanova

My research interests fall into two main tenets.

In the middle ages, my research explores written culture, multilingualism and cultural transmission across languages and political contexts. I am concerned with how meaning is locally created, and how medieval actors used textual production to seek to bring about changes in their socio-political circumstances.

 My first monograph, currently in preparation,  Inventing Slavonic: Cultures of Writing between Rome and Constantinople, explores the earliest texts concerned with the invention of the Slavonic alphabet. It analyses how the alphabet continued to be contested and re-invented 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. I am interested in how nineteenth- and twentieth- century interpretations of medieval sources have been guided by nationalist projects, and continue to permeate scholarship as the common sense assumptions about medieval sources or people.  To this end, I spent three years co-convening an international research network based at the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, entitled New Critical Approaches to the Byzantine World, which sought to bring historical theory to the study of the Byzantine World.  Springing from this, I am currently co-editing a book with Benjamin Anderson (Cornell) entitled Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline? Towards a Critical Historiography.