Dr Mirela Ivanova
School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities
Lecturer in Medieval History
Full contact details
School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities
Jessop West
1 Upper Hanover Street
Sheffield
S3 7RA
- Profile
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I work on the intellectual and social history of Byzantium and its northern neighbours in Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages. I joined the Department of History in Sheffield in 2021.
Prior to this I was a Junior Research Fellow in Medieval History at the University of Oxford. I have also held fellowships at Koç University’s Research Centre for Study of Anatolian Civilisations, in Istanbul; the Centre for Advanced Study in Sofia. In addition, I have spent various lengths of time visiting, researching or learning languages at the Hilandar Research Library in Ohio State University, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, in Washington, and St Petersburg’s Derzhavin Institute.
- Research interests
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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, Inventing Slavonic: Cultures of Writing between Rome and Constantinople (Oxford University Press, 2024), explored 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 the nationalist projects of the nineteenth- and twentieth- century have shaped our understanding of mediaeval sources, and how these understandings have in turn shaped heritage practices of protecting, maintaining, abandoning or actively ignoring medieval and early modern material remains.
Two publications with Benjamin Anderson (Cornell) have emerged from this: Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline? Towards a Critical Historiography (Penn State, 2023) and an article in the English Historical Review, ‘The Politics of Byzantine Studies: between Nations and Empires’ (2024). I am currently putting together a project which will assess how these historiographical practices have shaped the heritage management in eastern European states .
- Publications
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Books
Edited books
- Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline? Towards a Critical Historiography. Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press.
- Transmitting and Circulating the Late Antique and Byzantine Worlds. BRILL.
Journal articles
- Inventing Cyrillic. HISTORY TODAY, 74(5).
- The De Thematibus (‘on the themes’) of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus. Translated with Introductory Chapters and Notes. By JohnHaldon. Translated Texts for Byzantinists 11. Liverpool, Liverpool University Press. 2021. xii + 283 pp. £95 (hardback). ISBN 978 1 800 85998 2.. Early Medieval Europe, 31(3), 509-511.
- Bulgaria's traumatic revival. History today, 71(11), 88-91.
- Inventing and ethnicising Slavonic in the long ninth century. Journal of Medieval History, 47(4-5), 574-586. View this article in WRRO
- Faithful Translators or Obfuscators? Chapter 13 of the Vita Constantini and Perceptions of Learned Men in Byzantium. Кирило-Методиеви Студии, 31, 169-182.
- Re-thinking the Life of Constantine-Cyril the Philosopher. The Slavonic and East European Review, 98(3), 434-463. View this article in WRRO
- The Politics of Byzantine Studies: Between Nations and Empires. The English Historical Review, ceae159.
Chapters
- Seeing like a church: the Politics of Theophylact of Ohrid's Fifteen Martyrs of Tiberioupolis In Booth P & Whitby M (Ed.), TRAVAUX ET MEMOIRES, Mélanges James Howard-Johnston (pp. 675-694). Paris: Association des Amis du Centre d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance.
- The Madara Horseman and Triumphal Inscriptions in Krum's Early Medieval Bulgaria (c.803-814) (pp. 166-184). Leiden: Brill.
- Teaching activities
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Undergraduate:
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HST112 - Paths from Antiquity to Modernity
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HST116 - Empire from Antiquity to the Middles Ages
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HST21013 - Byzantine Intersectionality: Race, Gender and Power in the Medieval Mediterranean, 500-1300
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HST3126 - Nomadland: The Peoples of the Steppe, 600-1000
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HST31040 - Making History Public
Postgraduate:
- HST6042 - Presenting the Past
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- Public Engagement
I have a longstanding commitment to access and outreach and have worked with a range of initiatives and organisations to deliver seminars, classes, and university application support to schools across the UK. I am very happy to be contacted by schools!
I also have an interest in non-academic writing, and have published on a range of topics, like Soviet Blocks, the Balkans in the age of the refugee crisis, the memory of the Ottoman empire and the invention of the Slavonic alphabet for the likes of the Los Angeles Review of Books, Balkanist Magazine and History Today.
In 2021, I was selected as a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, which means I have had the opportunity to share my research with a wider audience on Radio 3, and you can hear me talk about Slavic culture and Myths and about dystopian bureaucracies.