Mirela Ivanova is a graduate student in Byzantine History at the University of Oxford. She has lived, worked, or studied in Bulgaria, England, the States, and Russia, and written on politics, socialism, medieval literacy, culture, social mobility, feminism, and the like for a range of publications including the Oxford Left Review, the London Progressive Journal, and ISIS Magazine. She’s interested in people, spaces, coffee, and music, and is currently working on a thesis on cultural transmission between the medieval Balkans and the Byzantine Empire.