Divna Manolova

Profile

Biography

A graduate of Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” (BA in Philosophy) and Central European University (MA and PhD in Medieval Studies), Divna came to York as a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Medieval Literature. Integrating literature and the history of science, her current project studies competing imperial worldviews and cosmologies in the eastern Mediterranean (11^th–15^th centuries).

Before coming to York, Divna was the principal investigator of Polymathy and Intellectual Curiosity in Byzantine Discourses of Science and Philosophy (13th-15th Centuries), a project at the University of Silesia in Katowice funded by European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement.

Divna also held pre- and postdoctoral positions at Dumbarton Oaks, the Research Center for Anatolian Civilisations, Brown University’s Department of Classics, New Europe College and the Institute for Research in the Humanities of the University of Bucharest. She taught medieval intellectual history at Sofia University and at CEU.

Finally, Divna has also initiated the oral history project Revealing the Voices Behind the Cover, a series of interviews with members of the Byzantine Studies community).

Research

Overview

Divna’s research deals with Byzantine intellectual history and, in particular, with the history of Byzantine science and philosophy. She has worked on the interaction between philosophy/science and rhetoric in medieval epistolography, on education in the mathematical sciences in Byzantium and the history of cognitive emotions such as curiosity and wonder. Most recently, she has embarked on the study of cosmological diagrams in medieval Greek manuscripts. The latter inquiry feeds into the monograph on the scientific and aesthetic theories of space in fourteenth-century Byzantium Divna is currently completing.

Her most recent publications deal with late Byzantine arithmetic and astronomy and the impact of the latter on the processes of teaching and learning the mathematical sciences in late medieval Constantinople. Together with Baukje van den Berg and Przemysław Marciniak, Divna is currently co-editing the volume Preserving, Commenting, Adapting: Byzantine Commentaries on Ancient Texts in the Twelfth Century and Beyond.