Mercedes Pérez Vidal is Ramón y Cajal Senior Researcher at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She received her PhD in Art History in 2013 from the Universidad de Oviedo, with a thesis on the Dominican female monasteries of medieval Castile. Her research focuses on the cultural history and art history of women’s convents during the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, specifically the relation of art and architecture to liturgy; nuns’ libraries and manuscript production; and the networks of cultural transfer between the Iberian Peninsula and other territories.
She has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2014–2015), MSCA fellow at the University of Padua (2015–2017), and the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (2017–2019), and senior scientific fellow and lecturer at the University of Oviedo (2021-2022). She is also a researcher part of the team of the project Books, Rituals and Space in a Cistercian Nunnery. Living, Praying and Reading in Lorvão at the Nova University Lisbon (2021-2025). She is the author of Arte y liturgia en los monasterios de Dominicas en Castilla (2021), and the editor of Women Religious Crossing between Cloister and the World. Nunneries in Europe and the Americas, ca. 1200–1700 (2022).
She will present a lecture titled “Gender and Collaborative Work: Wo/Men Religious in Writing, Making, and Performing Liturgy in the Iberian World.”