Centre for Medieval Studies
Divna Manolova
A graduate of Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” (BA in Philosophy) and Central European University (MA and PhD in Medieval Studies), Divna Manolova held pre- and postdoctoral positions at Dumbarton Oaks, the Research Center for Anatolian Civilisations, Brown University, New Europe College, University of Bucharest before she was the principal investigator of Polymathy and Intellectual Curiosity in Byzantine Discourses of Science and Philosophy (13th-15th Centuries), a MSCA POLONEZ 1 project at the University of Silesia in Katowice (2016–18). Next, Divna was a Postdoctoral Fellow (2018–22) at the Centre for Medieval Literature (University of York and University of Southern Denmark), a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (Department III: Visualization and Material Cultures of the Heavens in Eurasia and North Africa (4000 BCE–1700 CE) Working Group), and a MSCA Paris Region Fellow at UMR 8630 SYRTE - Systèmes de Référence Temps-Espace (CNRS and l’Observatoire de Paris - Université PSL). She is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent
University. Her current project – COSMOPOET - Teaching the Cosmos in Poetry and Prose: Aratus’ Phaenomena and Cleomedes’ The
Heavens in Late Byzantium – aims to rethink the relationship between poetry and astronomy and ultimately, it investigates medieval Greek solutions to the question as to how to explain the cosmos through literary means.
Divna taught medieval intellectual history at Sofia University and at CEU, and history of medieval science at the University of York where she was awarded with the Making the Difference teaching award (2021). Her latest publications include the Oxford Bibliography of Byzantine Science (2024) and “Reflections on Nikephoros Gregoras’ Historia Rhōmaïkē: Innovation, Variety, Emotion” (2023). She leads the international team who organizes the biennial History of Science in the Medieval World Summer School in collaboration with the University of Veliko Tarnovo since 2022.
