Maria Konstantinidou
PhD candidate, Department of History and Archeology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece
Maria Konstantinidou is a graduate of the Department of History and Archaeology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
She holds a Master’s Degree in European History and her master thesis was about the hybridization of the Books of Hours in Early Modern England. In the fall of 2019, she was accepted at the PhD program of the Department of History of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her thesis, titled “Nutritional deviations: foodways as a field of ideological conflicts during the Middle Ages”, is about the connection between food and religious experience.
More specifically, she is quite interested on the exceptional food choices of the heretical movements that emerged in the turbulent 11th and 12th centuries; the most radical being those of the Cathars. Her research interests are also focusing on the cultural context of food and nutrition in Western Europe, as well as the individuals that consumed and potentially created recipes and recipe collections.
Maria has participated in the CIVIS program, as she attended the online seminar Tasting the Past: Recipes as Historical Sources (1400-2000) organized by the University of Tubingen. She has also participated in online courses about the medieval English cuisine organized as a partnership between the Blackfriars Restaurant and Durham University’s Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She is currently a fellow at the Special Account for Research Funding (E.L.K.E.), working on an academic project concerning medieval history.
Finally, she is Assistant Managing Editor and Editorial Board member of the academic journal Mos Historicus: A Critical Review of European History, which is under the auspices of the University of Athens and is published digitally at the National Documentation Centre.