Brief Biography

Emese Muntán is a historian of early modern Southeast Europe, focusing on the connected histories of Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islam in these regions. She earned her PhD from Central European University (CEU) in June 2021. Between 2015-2021 she was a junior researcher in the ERC research project OTTOCONFESSION led by Dr. Tijana Krstić at CEU. In 2022/23 she was a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fellow at I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of the Reformation Research Consortium (RefoRC) 2019 Paper Award and the CEU Best Dissertation Award (2021/22). She taught courses at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest (2018/19) and she was a teaching fellow in Princeton University’s Global History Lab (GHL) and History Dialogues project (2021/22).

Research Interests

Period: 15th-18th centuries
Area: Southeast and Central Europe
Topics: Catholic missions, intra- and inter-confessional relations, diplomatic networks, mobility and knowledge transfer

Publications

• ‘Brokering Tridentine Marriage Reforms and Legal Pluralism in Seventeenth-Century Northern Ottoman Rumeli’, in Tijana Krstić and Derin Terzioğlu (eds), Entangled Confessionalizations? Dialogic Perspectives on the Politics of Piety and Community Building in the Ottoman Empire, 15th–18th Centuries, (Gorgias Press), 2022, 701–725. (OA)
• Negotiating Catholic Reform: Global Catholicism and Its Local Agents in Northern Ottoman Rumeli (1570s–1680s), (PhD Dissertation: Central European University, 2021) [Available in Open Access]
• ‘Uneasy Agents of Tridentine Reforms—Catholic Missionaries in Southern Ottoman Hungary and Their Local Competitors in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Journal of Early Modern Christianity, Vol. 7/1 (2020): 151–175. Recipient of the Reformation Research Consortium 2019 Paper Award (OA)
• ‘Jesuit “Informants” and the Orthodox Communities of Southern Ottoman Hungary in the Early Seventeenth Century’, in B. Székely Dorottya Piroska et al (eds), Közvetítő rendszerek, médiumok és hatalomgyakorlás a kora újkori Európában [Knowledge transfer, media, and the exercise of power in early modern Europe], (Gondolat Kiadó), 2021, 133–153. [in Hungarian]
• ‘Confessional Transgressions—Illegitimate and Mixed Marriages in Seventeenth-century Banat’, in Gábor Ittzés (ed.), Viszály és együttélés: Vallások és felekezetek a török hódoltság korában [Conflict and coexistence: Religions and denominations in Ottoman Hungary], (Universitas), 2017, 89–107. [in Hungarian]