Maroula Perisanidi

Dr. Maroula Perisanidi is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Leeds' School of History, Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures. She holds a PhD from the University of Nottingham (2015) and has held fellowships at the University of Birmingham and the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on medieval/Byzantine history, disability studies, gender and sexuality, and ecclesiastical history. She currently leads the project 'A Cultural History of Disability in Byzantium' (2022–2025).

Key research areas include clerical continence in twelfth-century England and Byzantium, Byzantine masculinity, and intersections of disability with gender, race, and religion. Her monograph Clerical Continence in Twelfth-Century England and Byzantium (2019, Routledge) compares Western and Byzantine approaches to clerical marriage and purity. She also explores how Byzantine texts redefined masculinity through scholarly identity and challenged martial ideals.

Her recent projects investigate Byzantine perceptions of disability, using sources like imperial mobility aids and impaired individuals’ biographies. This work challenges ableist historiography and examines how disability intersected with social status and spirituality.

• Education: PhD, University of Nottingham (2015)
• Awards: Wellcome Trust Fellowship, Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship

Teaching includes modules on Late Antique/Byzantine history, medieval religious communities, and paleography. She supervises postgraduate researcher Isabella Lewis. Her lab teams focus on interdisciplinary approaches to gender, disability, and religious authority in premodern Europe and Byzantium.