Catarina Fernandes Barreira is a Research Fellow in the Institute of Medieval Studies (IEM), Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Nova University of Lisbon, funded by national funds through the FCT, under the Norma Transitória DL 57/2016/CP1453/CT0019. Her field of specialisation is Medieval Art, and her research interests focus on Medieval Liturgy, Cistercian Order, Cistercian Monasteries; Libraries; Scriptoria; Codices (and their material study); circulation of manuscripts. She holds a PhD in Art Sciences from the University of Lisbon (2011). Her doctoral research, undertaken as a fellow of the FCT, focused on the analysis of gargoyles within Portuguese gothic and late-gothic buildings. Thereafter, she was awarded with a Post Doctoral fellowship also sponsored by FCT: her work focussed on the illuminated manuscripts of Alcobaça in the 14th and 15th c., in a project completed in July 2017. In her research, she explored the Alcobaça library manuscripts, uncovering a previously unexplored timeline and distinguishing between external and monastery-crafted manuscripts. She also laid the foundation for ongoing investigations, innovating methodologies for analysing illuminated codices, particularly liturgical manuscripts. Presently she is conducting investigations into the illuminated liturgical codices produced in the scriptorium of Alcobaça between the end of the 12th and the 16th c. premised on contexts of production, use (s) and circulation (in the monastery and within other Cistercian communities). She is also exploring Alcobaça´s identity as a centre of book production and how it shaped other monastic communities like Lorvão. A leading force in competitive funding enterprises, she was the Principal Investigator of the project Cistercian Horizons. Studying and characterizing a medieval scriptorium and its production. Alcobaça. Local identities and liturgical uniformity in dialogue, concluded in 2022, and financed by the FCT. Presently, she is the Principal Investigator of the project Books, rituals and space in a Cistercian nunnery. Living, praying and reading in Lorvão, 13th-16th c., also financed by the FCT. Additionally, she supervised 2 PhD thesis(es) both funded by FCT fellowships and co-supervised 2 MSc dissertation. She frequently publishes articles in national and international journals, and chapters in books, both as individual author and as co-author. She is co-editor of three peer reviewed books from leading international publishers: Loci Sepulcrales. Places of memory and burial in the Middle Ages (Brepols); An embodied religion: materialities and devotion (Peter Lang) and Cistercian Horizons. Collected essays (Trivent). From 2015 to 2019, she led the research group Images, Texts, and Representations. Then, from 2019 to 2021, she served as Assistant Director at IEM a position to which she was re-appointed in 2023 and holds currently. Since 2018 that she gathers experience evaluating Post Doctoral and research projects applications within international agencies and she is member of the panel of evaluators of the following: FWO Review College, Flanders; European Commission and the evaluation panel of the Slovak Research and Development Agency (SRDA), Bratislava, Slovakia.