Dr. Maya Soifer Irish’s research focuses on religious violence and toleration, and investigates the legal, social and economic situation of religious minorities in Iberian Christian societies.

Her first book, Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile: Tradition, Coexistence, and Change, was published in 2016 by The Catholic University of America Press. It explores changes in Jewish-Christian relations in the Iberian kingdom of Castile during the pivotal period of the "reconquest" and the hundred years following the end of its most active phase (eleventh to mid-fourteenth century). Focusing especially on the Christian heartland north of the Duero River, known as Old Castile, the book offers a detailed investigation of the Jews' changing relations with the monarchy, the church, and the towns.

She is currently completing a new book, The Politics of Antisemitism in Medieval Spain: Seville and the Riots of 1391, which explores the path to the worst outbreak of anti-Jewish violence on Iberian soil. It examines Christians’ treatment of the Jewish community in Seville – the epicenter of the riots – in the decades preceding the massacres, arguing that urban oligarchies seeking greater influence in both municipal and royal affairs adopted antisemitic discourses to undermine the Jews and legitimize their own political ascendance. In the exaggerated claims of Jewish influence, they found a potent tool for achieving the very same hegemony they accused the Jews of pursuing.

Her articles have appeared in The Journal of Medieval History, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, Medieval Encounters, Sefarad, and many edited volumes. In 2025-26, she held a Kingdon Fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has served as President of the Fourteenth Century Society, President of the American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain, and President of the Texas Medieval Association.

Selected Publications:

• Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile: Tradition, Coexistence, and Change (The Catholic University of America Press, 2016).
• “Die Wahrheit unterdrücken:’ Ein christliches Narrativ von unrechtmäßiger jüdischer Macht in Sevilla vor 1391,” in Resilienz und Scheitern, ed. Martin Endreß, Lukas Clemens, and Benjamin Rampp (Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, 2025), 51-75.
• “Jewish Officials at Royal Courts in al-Andalus and Castile (tenth to fourteenth centuries): Continuities and Disjunctions,” in A Plural Peninsula: Studies in Honour of Professor Simon Barton, ed. Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo (Brill, The Medieval Mediterranean series, 2023), 305-327.
• "Massacres of Jews in Medieval Western Europe (1096-1392)," in The Cambridge World History of Genocide, Vol. I, Genocide in the Ancient, Medieval and Premodern Worlds, ed. Ben Kiernen, Tracy Maria Lemos, and Tristan Taylor (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 425-447.
• “Landscapes of Salvation, Landscapes of Power: Jews, Christians, and Urban Space in Fourteenth-Century Seville,” in Constructing Iberian Identities, 1000-1700, ed. Thomas Barton, Marie Kelleher, Zrinka Stahuljak, and Antonio Zaldivar (Brepols, 2022), 23-37.
• "Toward 1391: The anti-Jewish preaching of Ferran Martinez in Seville," in The Medieval Roots of Antisemitism: Continuities and Discontinuities From the Middle Ages to the Present Day, ed. by Johnathan Adams and Cordelia Hess (Routledge, 2018), 306-319
• “The Problem of Old Debts: Jewish Moneylenders in Northern Castile (Belorado and Miranda de Ebro, ca. 1300),” Sefarad 74 (2), 2014, 279-303.
• “Tamquam domino proprio: Contesting Ecclesiastical Lordship Over Jews in Thirteenth-Century Castile,” Medieval Encounters 19 (2013), 534-566.
• “The Castilian Monarchy and the Jews (11th to 13th Century),” in Center and Periphery: Studies on Power in the Medieval World in Honor of William Chester Jordan, ed. by Katherine L. Jansen, G. Geltner, and Anne E. Lester (Brill, 2013), 39-49.
• “Beyond Convivencia: Critical Reflections on the Historiography of Interfaith Relations in Christian Spain,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 1 (2009), 19-35.