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,  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 .