Carolina Obradors
2025-2026
Tomás y Valiente
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
The Words of Belonging. Towards a Glossary of Urban Identification in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon
Biography
Carolina Obradors Suazo (Barcelona, 1986) is a historian specialising in the urban history of the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon. She earned her Ph.D in History at the European University Institute (Florence, 2015) and was recently a UNA4Career-Marie Curie fellow at the Complutense University in Madrid, where she developed the research project Words That Mattered. The Narratives of Belonging in the Late Medieval Hispanic City (WordMat). The project allowed her to explore the connections between language and belonging in the late medieval city. She has been a member of the École des Hautes Études Hispaniques et Ibériques (Casa de Velázquez, 2020-2021) and collaborated with the research group ‘The Crown of Aragon, Islam and the Mediterranean World’ (CSIC, Barcelona). She is currently a member of the research group “History of the Hispanic and European Cities and their projection into the Americas” (UCM) and an affiliated researcher at the Laboratoire de Médiévistique Occidentale de Paris (Paris I).
Projet de recherche
The Words of Belonging. Towards a Glossary of Urban Identification in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon applies historical semantics to explore the creation of meaning in and around the ties that shaped urban communities in the Late Middle Ages.
Adopting a comparative approach, the project focusses on two case studies: Barcelona and Valencia. The main objective of the project is to address the contradictory and ambiguous use of terms related to urban belonging through a close examination of the linguistic concreteness offered by sources. To this aim, an extensive corpus will be compiled and digitized for processing with tools of textual data analysis. The corpus will be the basis for a terminological compilation of terms expressing belonging which will result in a digitized glossary.
From the angle of Digital Humanities, this project aims at creating accessible research tools as well at consolidating the deep fabrics of citizenship as a relevant field within medieval urban history.
Sélection de publications
2026 (expected). “Describing Identities. Between Assimilation and Distinction in Citizenship Narratives”, Medieval Encounters (forthcoming)
2025. “La justicia de la pertenencia. Negociar la ciudadanía desde las cortes jurisdiccionales. Barcelona, 1420”, Reti Medievali (forthcoming).
2025. “Les ciutadanies de Barcelona: normes, pràctiques i gestió de la pertinença urbana (segles XIV-XV)”, in Pere Ortí and Pere Verdés (eds.), Barcelona, esplendor i crisi del segle XV, Barcelona, Ajuntament de Barcelona, pp. 299-319.
2023. “Ritualizing Citizenship in Fifteenth-Century Barcelona”, Urban History, 50/4, pp. 659-673.
