As an undergraduate student, I read History at the University of Sofia, specialising in the history of Byzantium and the Balkan Peninsula. After a year of military service, I moved on to graduate study at the University of Chicago, where I completed a doctoral thesis on Byzantine Psalters. I worked for a while at the Walters Art Museum, where I catalogued the museum’s Greek manuscripts and studied its collection of East Christian art. More recently, I have curated two small exhibitions of icons in Oxford and in Santa Barbara. At the British Museum, I contribute regularly to the collections database. My research for the ‘Empires of Faith’ project focuses on Christian art in the Eastern Mediterranean.