Dr Mirela Ivanova

School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities

Lecturer in Medieval History

Mirela Ivanova
Profile picture of Mirela Ivanova
mirela.ivanova@sheffield.ac.uk
9 Mappin Street

Full contact details

Dr Mirela Ivanova
School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities
9 Mappin Street
Sheffield
S1 4DT
Profile

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

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

Books

  • Ivanova M (2024) . Oxford University Press.

Edited books

  • Anderson B & Ivanova M (Ed.) (2023) . Penn State University Press.
  • (Ed.) (2020) . BRILL.

Journal articles

  • Ivanova M (2025) . Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 49(2), 313-314.
  • Ivanova M (2025) . Early Medieval Europe, 33(1), 127-129.
  • Ivanova M & Anderson B (2024) . The English Historical Review, 139(600), 1230-1249.
  • Ivanova M (2024) Inventing Cyrillic. History Today, 74(5).
  • Ivanova M (2024) Inventing Slavonic: Cultures of Writing between Rome and Constantinople. HISTORY TODAY, 74(12), 99-99.
  • Ivanova M (2023) . Early Medieval Europe, 31(3), 509-511.
  • Ivanova M (2021) Bulgaria's traumatic revival. History today, 71(11), 88-91.
  • Ivanova M (2021) . Journal of Medieval History, 47(4-5), 574-586.
  • Ivanova M (2021) Faithful translators or obfuscators? Chapter 13 of the Vita Constantini and perceptions of learned men in Byzantium. Кирило-Методиеви Студии, 31, 169-182.
  • Ivanova (2020) . The Slavonic and East European Review, 98(3), 434-463.
  • Ivanova M & Jeffery H (2019) , 1-8.

Book chapters

  • Ivanova M (2024) (pp. xiii-xiv). Oxford University PressOxford
  • Ivanova M (2024) (pp. xix-xx). Oxford University PressOxford
  • Ivanova M (2022) 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.
  • Ivanova M (2019) (pp. 166-184). Leiden: Brill.
Teaching activities

Undergraduate:

  • HST112 - Paths from Antiquity to Modernity
  • HST116 - Empire from Antiquity to the Middles Ages
  • HST21013 - Byzantine Intersectionality: Race, Gender and Power in the Medieval Mediterranean, 500-1300
  • HST3126 - Nomadland: The Peoples of the Steppe, 600-1000
  • HST31040 - Making History Public

Postgraduate:

  • HST6042 - Presenting the Past
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 , the in the age of the refugee crisis, the memory of the and the invention of the 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 and about .