Ivana Arsic is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where she is carrying out the project CONVERSAS: Conversas of Muslim and Jewish Origin in the Premodern Crown of Aragon: Parallels and Contrasts (HORIZON MSCA-2022-PF). The project explores the cultural identities of Muslim and Jewish crypto-religious minorities within coerced mono-confessional pre-modern Crown of Aragon (c. 1400-1500) with an emphasis on women’s role in safeguarding its intangible cultural heritage.

During her PhD studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Ivana was a research fellow on national projects financed by The Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) and the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR). In 2017, she completed her PhD during which she was introduced to the problems that characterize religious encounters and conflicts in the late medieval and early modern Crown of Aragon, such as the coexistence of multiculturalism and multiconfessionalism, secular and ecclesiastical persecution of religious minorities, and religious bureaucracy and institutions and how they impacted religious minorities.

Since 2018, Ivana have been a postdoc at the Institute of Social Sciences in Serbia working in the fields of gender, religious and identity studies, specifically Spanish, and especially Sephardic cultural heritage and the religious customs and habits of Crypto-Jews with an emphasis on understanding early modern Sephardic women history. Her results have been published or are forthcoming in 1 book monograph, 2 co-edited monothematic volumes and numerous peer-reviewed papers. She is currently completing a second monograph, which analyses both heresy as well as the processes used against it, as two indivisible parts which she argue cannot be examined separately. Ivana (co)organized dozens of symposiums, round tables and conferences, including the International Workshop “Intersections of Gender and Genres in Medieval Judaism, Christianity, and Islam” (Barcelona, 2022).