Current position: Full Professor of Medieval Archaeology, Department of Prehistory, Archaeology, Ancient History, Greek Philology and Latin Philology, University of Alicante, Spain,  since 2003 and Director of the Archaeology and Heritage Research Group (UA). Previous Positions: pre-doctoral Fellow (1986-1989), an Assistant Lecturer (1990-95), an Associate Professor (1996-2002). She has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Archaeological Museum since 2022 and of the Governing Council of the Royal Monastery of Santa Maria de la Valldigna.

I am an expert in medieval and post-medieval archaeology, with particular interest in the transition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages and, especially, in the study of al-Andalus and medieval Islam. My main lines of research are the settlement, the city, the buildings and the Late Antique, medieval and Islamic material culture, as well as the Islamization process and the creation of the early al-Andalus; the archaeology of architecture and heritage. I have also addressed the issues of memory policies, the reinterpretation of ‘uncomfortable heritage’, the enhancement of built heritage and the gender perspective in knowledge.

I earned a doctorate in the University of Alicante in 1992 with a thesis on the Cora of Tudmir (La Cora de Tudmir: de la antigüedad tardía al mundo islámico. Poblamiento y cultura material).  My leadership skills are also reflected in my institutional responsibilities and commissions of trust. In recent years I have become a part of the national and international committees. Furthermore, I have held different positions for assessing and managing research in the main national assessment agencies (CNEAI, ANEP, ANECA).

I have also been a pioneer in my teaching activities. I have been responsible for the consolidation of medieval and post medieval archaeology in the Spanish university field, creating a new teaching, research and professional perspective that is nowadays consolidated. In this regard, I encouraged the creation of the Master in Professional Archaeology and Comprehensive Management of the Heritage of the University of Alicante in 2007. This is the first one in Spain and I coordinated it until 2010. I took part in the creation of the curricula for the history degree and I teach lessons in general, medieval and post medieval archaeology. I also wrote one of the main reference handbooks in the Spanish language, Arqueología, Introducción a la historia material de las sociedades del pasado, which has been reissued several times. I lead an established research team, training researchers in innovative areas of research (around fifty undergraduate dissertations and Master’s theses, and 13 supervised PhD theses at the Universities of Alicante and Lyon on the Late Antiquity, al-Andalus, medieval and post-medieval archaeology, and the material history of recent times).