This profile was current as of 2016, when she was part of the on-campus Kellogg community.
Belen Vicens is a historian of law and society in medieval Iberia. She is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Notre Dame and is currently writing a dissertation titled Negotiating Power and Privilege: Written Law, Monarchy, and the Nobility in Late Medieval Aragon. In this dissertation she examines the laws of Aragon and their relationship to the social and political transformations that the kingdom of Aragon underwent in the thirteenth century.
Her research interests include as well the study of cross-cultural interactions in medieval Iberia and the Mediterranean World. She has recently published a peer-reviewed article on Christian-Muslim relations in medieval and early modern Iberia titled Swearing by God: Muslim Oath-Taking in Late Medieval and Early Modern Christian Iberia (Medieval Encounters 20, no. 2 (2014): 11751). This article has won the Best First Article Prize of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies (ASPHS), and an earlier version of this article won the Vincent DeSantis Prize awarded by the Notre Dame Department of History.
She holds two Masters's degrees, one in Islamic Studies from UCLA (2008) and another in History from Notre Dame (2012), as well as two undergraduate dregrees from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. She is a native speaker of Spanish and Catalan and has advanced reading skills in Latin, Arabic, French, and Portuguese.