Aitor Boada Benito holds a Ph.D. cum laude in Religious Studies from Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2024), a Master’s in Religious Studies, and a Degree in Classical Philology from the same institution. He is currently a Researcher in the Department of Classical Philology at Universidad Complutense. His thesis, titled La Passio de Shirin: Corporality, Community Configuration, and Christian Hagiography in the Sasanian Empire, under the supervision of Juan Antonio Álvarez-Pedrosa, examined the significance of the representation of female martyrs’ bodies in Greek hagiography within the Sasanian Empire—a political, social, and religious context where Christianity did not hold a hegemonic position.
His research focuses on the literary analysis and translation of late antique hagiographic literature, particularly that produced by Christian religious communities outside the Byzantine Empire or in marginalized positions. Additionally, he applies perspectives such as non-human analysis and Affect Theory to hagiographic literature. As part of this work, he is the editor of the collective volume Thaúmata: Critical and Underrepresented Perspectives on Hagiography and Hagiographic Studies (Brill, forthcoming). He has also contributed to several volumes that address the analysis of female holiness and Gender Studies in historical sources, such as (Com)passions: Women Religious Embodied Spiritualities in Christianity (From Late Antiquity to Early Modern Period) (Brepols, forthcoming), edited by Beatriz Ferrús, Araceli Rosillo, and Julia Lewandowska, and El nuevo Yambo de las mujeres: igualdad en estudios del mundo antiguo (Guillermo Escolar Editor, 2023), edited by Berta González Saavedra and María del Val Gago Saldaña.
He has also published several articles in indexed journals, such as Veleia (Marked Bodies: Skin as Communicative Entity in Late Antique Hagiography, 2022), where he highlights how the bodies of holy individuals served as a useful tool for identity configuration in Late Antique hagiography. His philological experience in Latin and Greek allows him to focus on the translation, comparison, and literary study of hagiographic sources and versions. Additionally, as a translator, he has published a critical edition and translation of the surviving poems of Sappho (Safo, Torremozas, 2020). Alongside his publications, he is currently a Section Editor (Church History) for the journal Open Theology (Walter de Gruyter).
