Notes on Contributors
Xosé-Lois Armada
is Científico Titular (tenured) at the Institute of Heritage Sciences (INCIPIT), CSIC in Santiago de Compostela. Other stages of his research career were carried out at the Universidade da Coruña, Durham University, and University College London. His research deals with ancient metallurgy (copper-based and precious metals) and its social interpretation, focusing geographically on the Atlantic regions of Europe as well as the western Mediterranean. His books include Atlantic Europe in the First Millennium BC: Crossing the Divide (ed. with Tom Moore, Oxford, 2011) and Metals, Minds and Mobility: Integrating Scientific Data with Archaeological Theory (ed. with M. Murillo-Barroso and M. Charlton, Oxbow, 2019). From 2021 to 2024, he was the coordinador of the ArchaeologyHub-CSIC.
Silvia Armando
(Ph.D. Università degli Studi della Tuscia, Viterbo, 2012), is an art historian specializing in medieval material culture, with a particular focus on ivory artifacts and artistic exchanges between the Islamic and Christian Mediterranean worlds. She has published extensively on the historiography of Islamic art, examining how objects have been classified, collected, and interpreted in both medieval and modern scholarly traditions, as well as on ivory production and the transcultural movement of artifacts among Fatimid Egypt, southern Italy, and Christian Iberia. She has held research fellowships at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (Paris), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), and the American Academy in Rome, and has been awarded The Margaret B. Ševčenko Prize in Islamic Art and Culture and the Prix Marc de Montalembert. Previously teaching courses on medieval Mediterranean visual culture at the Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo and John Cabot University in Rome, since 2022 she works at the Italian Ministry of Culture.
Ana Cabrera Lafuente
(Ph.D. Universidad Complutense, Madrid, 2015) is a museum curator at the Spanish Institute of Tourism (TURESPAÑA). She worked at different Spanish museums between 2001 and 2018 and participated in national and international research projects. Her research focuses on historical textiles, especially those from the medieval period, combining archaeological and art perspectives with that of historical fashion, topics on which she has also curated exhibitions. She was awarded a Marie S.-Curie Fellowship at the Victoria and Albert Museum between 2016–2018. In addition to her role as co-editor of Silk. Fibre, Fabric and Fashion about works in the V&A silk textile collection, she has written multiple articles and book chapters about medieval textiles, including “Textiles from the Museum of San Isidoro (León): New Evidence for Re-evaluating Their Chronology and Provenance” (Brill, 2020).
María Judith Feliciano
(Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 2004) is Investigadora Científica in the Department of Art History and Heritage, Institute of History, at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid. She specializes in the visual culture of the late medieval and early modern Iberian worlds. Her work focuses on the impact of the arts of Islam in the artistic developments of Peninsular and American Viceregal societies. Her research has been funded by the Fulbright Commission, the Kress Foundation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Max Van Berchem Foundation, among others. She is the director of the Medieval Textiles in Iberia and the Mediterranean Research Project.
Julie A. Harris
(Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh, 1989) is a specialist in the art of medieval Iberia with a particular focus on Jewish illuminated manuscripts and material culture. She has participated in three of Therese Martin’s international research projects: “Reassessing the Role of Women as Makers,” “The Medieval Treasury across Frontiers and Generations,” and “The Medieval Iberian Treasury in Context: Collections, Connections, and Representations on the Peninsula and Beyond.” Harris’s recent publications have appeared in Ars Judaica, Gesta, Manuscript Studies, Medieval Encounters, Studies in Iconography, and Abstraction in Medieval Art: Beyond the Ornament, edited by Elina Gertsman (AUP, 2021). In 2020, she was awarded a Center for Spain in America fellowship at the Clark Institute for a project on the decorative carpet pages of Iberian Hebrew Bibles. In Spring 2024, she served as the Fishman Family Visiting Scholar in Jewish Studies at Vassar College.
Francisco J. Hernández
is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus at the College of Humanities, Carleton University, in Ottawa, Canada. Since 1996, he has been a corresponding member of the Spanish Royal Academy of History. Founder in 1979 and co-director (with Ramón Gonzálvez †) of the Burriel Project, he continues to pursue the project’s objective of studying and publishing the medieval documentation of Toledo Cathedral preserved in its archive, in Spain’s Archivo Histórico Nacional and Biblioteca Nacional. His main contributions to the project are Los cartularios de Toledo. Catálogo documental (1985; 2nd ed. 1996); Las rentas del rey. Sociedad y fisco en el reino castellano del s. XIII (2 vols., 1993); The Mozarabic Cardinal (with Peter Linehan, 2004); and Los hombres del rey y la transición de Alfonso X el Sabio a Sancho IV (2 vols., 2021). Additional publications are listed at https://carleton.ca/bhum/people/francisco-j-hernandez/.
Jitske Jasperse
(Ph.D. University of Amsterdam, 2013) is Ramón y Cajal Researcher at the Institute of History, Spanish National Research Council, Madrid, whose research foregrounds the social roles of medieval artworks within the construction and communication of gender, status, and authority. She is the author of two books, including Medieval Women, Material Culture, and Power (2020), and the editor of the collected volume The Social Lives of Medieval Rings (2025) as well as co-editor with K. Dempsey of Getting the Sense(s) of Small Things/Sinn und Sinnlichkeit kleiner Dinge, a special issue of Das Mittelalter (2020). Her articles have appeared in international and interdisciplinary journals, among others Studies in Iconography, Journal of Medieval History, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, Medieval Encounters, and Archivo Español de Arte.
Therese Martin
(Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh, 2000) is Senior Researcher and Head of the Department of Medieval Studies at the Instituto de Historia, CSIC, Madrid. She specializes in women’s involvement with art and architecture during the central Middle Ages, and in the intersections of medieval Iberia’s multiple cultures. Among her prize-winning publications is “The Margin to Act: A Framework of Investigation for Women’s (and Men’s) Medieval Art-Making,” Journal of Medieval History (2016). She is the author of Queen as King: Politics and Architectural Propaganda in Twelfth-Century Spain (Brill, 2006), and she has edited The Medieval Iberian Treasury in the Context of Cultural Interchange, Expanded Edition (Brill, 2020), as well as Reassessing the Roles of Women as ‘Makers’ of Medieval Art and Architecture (Brill, 2012). The latter publication resulted from a project of the same name, funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant (2010–2015).
Ignacio Montero-Ruiz
received his undergraduate degree in Geography and History (1986) and his Ph.D. in the field of Prehistory (1991) from the Universidad Complutense, Madrid. In 1996 he was employed as post-doctoral researcher at the CSIC, where since 2000 he has held a permanent research position in the Institute of History. The main focus of his research is archaeometallurgy, and he has carried out several projects investigating metals from different time periods and geographies. His research has been published in more than 300 papers, book chapters, and monographs, with a significant number of publications in international journals. Although all metals used in Antiquity fall under his purview, he has specialized in the technology of non-ferrous metals.
Tom Nickson
(Ph.D. University of London, 2009) is Reader in Medieval Art & Architecture at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. His teaching and research focus on England and Iberia c.1100–1600, with an emphasis on the relationship between objects, texts, and architectural spaces. His first book, Toledo Cathedral: Building Histories in Medieval Castile, won the 2015 Eleanor Tufts Book Award, and he is co-editor (with Nicola Jennings) of Gothic Architecture in Spain: Invention and Imitation (2020). Recent publications include “Fernando III and Gothic Architecture” (2022), and “The Names of God: Art, Power, and Ritual in Medieval Córdoba” (2024).
Shannon L. Wearing
(Ph.D. Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2015) is a specialist in medieval Iberian manuscripts. She was recently awarded a Licentiate in Mediaeval Studies from the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, where she was a Mellon Post-doctoral Fellow 2019–2020 and a Visiting Fellow 2021–2022. Her research at PIMS yielded “The Anxious Image: Figuration and Falsification in Medieval Iberian Charters,” Studies in Iconography (2025). She has published on illuminated cartularies in the Journal of Medieval History (2016) and in Romanesque Patrons and Processes: Design and Instrumentality in Romanesque Europe (2018). With Joseph Ackley, she co-edited Illuminating Metalwork: Metal, Object, and Image in Medieval Manuscripts (De Gruyter, 2022), and, with Amanda Dotseth, Collective Display: Medieval Objects Out of Isolation (Brepols, forthcoming). The former Managing Editor of Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, Wearing is now Publications Manager and Curatorial Consultant at the Meadows Museum, Dallas. She is preparing a book manuscript on royal artistic patronage and courtly culture in twelfth-century Barcelona.