Ivana

Arsic

Ivana Arsić is a classical philologist and cultural historian specializing in the socio-behavioral practices of crypto-religious minorities and the preservation of intangible cultural heritage of disenfranchised religious groups in Late Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, with a strong focus on gender perspectives. She received her PhD in 2017 in Cultures in Contact in the Mediterranean from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where her research examined religious encounters and conflicts in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon, focusing on multicultural coexistence, the persecution of religious minorities, and the role of religious bureaucracy and institutions. In 2018, she joined the Centre for Sociological and Anthropological Studies at the Institute of Social Sciences (Serbia) as a Research Assistant. From 2023 to 2025, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where she led the project Conversas: Conversas of Muslim and Jewish Origin in the Premodern Crown of Aragon: Parallels and Contrasts. The project provides systematic, comparative, and interdisciplinary analysis of the religious and behavioral patterns of Muslim and Jewish descendants in the Crown of Aragon, with particular attention to the role of women in safeguarding intangible cultural heritage. Her research included extensive archival fieldwork across Spain and France, examining undigitized manuscripts to identify gender roles, customs, and religious attitudes among Conversas and Moriscas. In addition to research, during MSCA she also taught in the Department of Humanities and the Department of Global Studies at UPF. In 2026, she joined ILC-CSIC as a member of the project West of Eden (WE): Muslim and Jewish Cultures in the Western Mediterranean.

Her research on interreligious encounters and conflicts, processes of acculturation, and the formation of contested, hybrid, and intersectional identities has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Gender & History, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, and Studia Historica. Historia Medieval. Her forthcoming book, Fall from Grace: The Inquisitorial Trial of Jaume de Casafranca and Interwoven Proceedings in Premodern Barcelona (Brill, 2026), further develops her research on inquisitorial documentation, religious minorities, and social dynamics in late medieval Iberia.