PAIXUE Associate Members

Ivan Marić is a research assistant on the PAIXUE team, focusing on literary performances of Byzantine literati between eighth and tenth centuries. Ivan's PhD, supervised by Prof. Niels Gaul and Dr Tom Brown, is an interdisciplinary examination of models of imperial authority under the first two emperors of the Isaurian dynasty – Leo III and Constantine V – and their highly-contested legacy during the iconoclast controversy and its aftermath (c. 726–867). The thesis traces how the two rulers became popular and appealing imperial models in their own time, and how this image has been challenged and deconstructed, and a revised, politically appropriate version of history inserted in public discourse. Ivan is preparing a chapter on the effects of the Arab siege of Constantinople in 717/18 on Leo III's ideology and expansion of the cult of the cross in Constantinople for an edited volume on Religion and War from Antiquity to Early Modernity.

Lucia Michielin is the Database Developer, and her task is to develop the Edinburgh Database of Byzantine Literati further and maintain it. She got his MA and Scuola di Specializzazione degrees at the University of Padua (Italy) on Roman Archaeology. In 2010 she attended a master in Geotechnologies for Archaeology at the University of Siena (Italy), with a focus on GIS, Databases, and 3D reconstructions. Since then she specialised in the field of Digital Humanities taking part in numerous projects in UK and Europe. She earned a PhD in Classics at the University of Edinburgh with a research project about the role of doors and windows within domestic spaces in Imperial Italy. In her thesis, ‘Fores et fenestrae. A computational study of doors and windows in Roman domestic space,’ she applied computational approach to the analysis the impact of openings in the architecture and everyday life of Roman houses.