Индивидуални проекти

В своя проект проф. Володимир Бурега разглежда живота на православните църкви в Украйна в условията на продължаващата война – за периода от началото й през февруари 2022 г. до февруари 2023 г. След руската военна инвазия в Украйна настъпват дълбоки трансформации в украинската православна общност. Тези процеси ще окажат влияние върху следвоенна Украйна в бъдеще. За своето изследване проф. Бурега ще анализира основните официални документи посветени на войната от православните църкви в Украйна. Изследването му ще има за цел да отговори на въпросите как църквите разглеждат войната и как изпълняват своето служение в условията на война. Проф. Бурeга ще постави акцента върху принципната разлика между позицията на православните църкви в Украйна и позицията на Руската православна църква, която напълно подкрепи руската агресия. Специално внимание ще бъде отделено на дълбоките промени настъпили в Украинската православна църква, която преди войната беше част от Московската патриаршия. През първите три месеца от началото на войната Украинската църква прекъсна всякакви отношения с Москва и с патриарх Кирил. Друг фокус на този проект ще бъде развитието на отношенията между църквите и украинските държавни власти. Изследването ще обособи също различията в конфесионалната политика на централните и регионалните власти на Украйна.

Изучаването на Втората световна война, паметта и представите за нея, и до днес има първостепенна роля в украинския политически, културен, обществен и научен дискурс. В условията на съвременната война на Русия срещу Украйна, споменът за Втората световна война - предишната разрушителна война на територията на Украйна, става още по-актуален за държавата, учените и обществеността. В настоящия проект със заглавие „Паметта за Втората световна война в съвременна Украйна“, д-р Игор Дворкин  продължава изследванията си за мястото на Втората световна война в съвременния украински дискурс след възстановяването на украинската независимост през 1991 г. От този исторически момент е характерно съвместното съществуване на национални и постсъветски исторически наративи в политическата, научната и образователната сфера. След Евромайдана и началото на руско-украинската война през 2014 г. и особено след законодателните промени от 2015 г., наречени „закони за декомунизация“, ситуацията обаче се промени в полза на националния подход. Тези събития оказаха значително влияние върху хуманитарната сфера в Украйна, както и върху политиките за паметта и историята. В своето изследване д-р Дворкин анализира следните явления:• Съветското наследство и постсъветските реалности [на Украйна]. „Великата отечествена война“ сравнена с Втората световна война (до 2014 г.).• Евромайдана (2014) и неговото въздействие върху върху политиките за паметта и историята. Законодателните промени от 2015 г. Промените в реториката, естетиката и топонимията и изобретяването на нови традиции.• Въздействието на пълномащабната руска инвазия (2022 г.) върху възприятията за Втората световна война. Възможни промени по време и след настоящата война.• Руската инструментализация на Втората световна война в условията на руската хибридна и пълномащабна война срещу Украйна и украинския отговор.• „Мемориалните места“, посветени на войната в украинския град: съветски и постсъветски (мемориали, паметници, възпоменателни практики).• Паметта за войната в топонимията на украинските градове: динамика на промените.

Защитата на рускоговорящите граждани на Украйна бе посочена като една от основните причини за руската инвазия през 2014 година, както и за последвалата пълномащабна война през 2022 година. Руските претенции за управление над украинците, които говорят на руски език, са основани обаче на твърде опростена уравновиловка относно език и национална идентичност. За да покажат, че подобни спекулации са всъщност далеч от реалността украинците започнаха процес на лингвистична конверсия. Годините след руската инвазия през 2014 г. дадоха началото на все по-осезателна лингвистична промяна на преминаване от руски към украински език.

26 July 2023 will mark the 60th anniversary of the calamitous earthquake that struck the Socialist Republic of Macedonia’s capital city of Skopje in 1963, taking the lives of 1070 persons and destroying more than two-thirds of the urban fabric. Building upon the memory- and critical disaster studies, I recently published several papers in which I argued that the natural disaster shattered not only the material reality of Skopjans but also the symbolic worlds they inhabited, thus influencing much of their imaginaries of the city and its future urban development.The present proposal aims at discussing the Bulgarian political and societal responses to the 1963 Skopje earthquake. In the midst of the present-day bilateral quarrel over history and memory, I postulate that the mid-1960s episode of multilevel solidarity and support – such as, inter alia, the Bulgarian calls for aiding Skopje within the framework of the UN as well as the citizen-to-citizen help – challenges the prevailing understandings of shared history and memory in both the societies: as exclusivist, politically-driven notions. I will develop this research into a working paper after researching at the Sofia archives, conducting several interviews with experts and history witnesses, and discussing it with the colleagues at CAS.

This project examines the social history of tangerine trees imported from Japan to Cheju Island (South Korea) from the 1960s to the 1980s. From the colonial era all the way to the April 3 Incident of 1948, hundreds of thousands of Cheju islanders went into exile and migrated to Japan in order to avoid political turmoil and economic hardships but were unable to return to their devastated homeland. These people sent money collectively to build Cheju infrastructures and shipped tens of thousands of tangerine trees for Cheju farmers to transform their farming lands from subsistence farming to growing cash crops. These tangerine trees have played a crucial role in rapidly increasing the farmers’ income and reshaping the ecology on Cheju, an exemplary tourist destination with a culture, history, and ecology distinct from the rest of Korea. By situating Cheju in the context of East Asian post-colonial / Cold War development, I develop a book project centered around three main points related to tangerine trees: 1) as gifts; 2) as commodities; and 3) as state projects. This project revisits the gift-commodity relationship and the governance of nature through the lens of tangerine trees, highlighting how Cheju has been controlled by, and has controlled, nature as a means of future-making.

My project, titled “Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva’s Personal Turn, 1975-1983,” examines a moment in the history of French thought when the certainties of Marxism and Structuralism were collapsing. In the last half-decade of the 1970s and first years of the 1980s, Barthes and Kristeva, leading intellectuals on the French Left, began to break from this political formation towards a new kind of apparently a-political thinking. Following a trip together to Mao’s China, which Barthes dismissed as a failure and Kristeva initially celebrated as a utopian experiment (before rejecting it in favor of a new appreciation for capitalist democracy, inspired by the United States, in the late 70s), each turned to writing about intimate emotional processes rather than political struggle. Barthes gave a series of lectures on ‘the lover’s discourse,’ culminating in a book on the subject; Kristeva prepared a book on ‘abjection,’ Powers of Horror, followed by her own analysis of love. And yet, I argue, their mutual turns to the personal were not only shaped by their different political reactions to Communist China, but represented a common project of rethinking the foundations of Western politics from a post-utopian vantage, founded on a careful analysis of psychic life.

The project concerns the cognitive value of literature. Is literature an effective cognitive medium? What sort of knowledge literature provides? How is this knowledge justified? These themes have constituted the focus of my recent research, which has already resulted in publications in significant journals. During my fellowship period, I will compose two articles on these themes. The first one defends the idea that literary works can give knowledge of what it is like to have a certain kind of experience, usually termed “experiential knowledge” in aesthetics. The second paper deals with the issue of justification. How can the reader draw valid conceptions and perspectives on what it is like to have a certain kind of experience from literary works? Drawing on esteemed research on epistemic trust, authority, responsibility, and virtuosity, I argue that many literary works meet the same conditions that social epistemologists have thought to lie behind valid epistemic trust. Together with my previous publications, these articles form the basis of a monograph the manuscript of which I plan to finish by the end of 2024. The results of the project are important for understanding the threats related to the global decrease of literary reading witnessed in recent decades.

The project is about writing a book on the Russo-Ottoman War of 1828-1829, focusing on its long-term impact on the Balkans and the Caucasus. In the scholarly literature the war has been studied from narrow and nationalistic agendas, without using the Ottoman archives and with little use of the archives of Georgia and Armenia. The proposed research and ensuing monograph will develop a synthetic and comprehensive narrative and a more objectively balanced view of the war, without being drowned in technical details. Research questions: What was the impact of the 1828-29 Russo-Ottoman War on the European balance of power, the Eastern Question, the Balkans and the Caucasus? Why were Russian military authorities reluctant to use Balkan irregulars in this war? Were the Bulgar volunteers similar to the Greek klephti? Why was Russia more successful than the Ottomans in gaining the neutrality of Kurdish tribes along the Caucasian borderlands? Why did Russia set up an Armenian province out of the khanates of Erivan and Nakhichevan, ceded by Qajar Iran in 1828? Apart from the Greek independence and autonomy of the Danubian principalities, what was the legacy of the war?

I identified and deciphered unpublished cuneiform tablet from the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. Surprisingly, the Middle Babylonian text (ca. 1500-1200 BCE) turned out to be a forerunner to a medical treatise on Bronchial complaints from the Nineveh Medical Encyclopaedia. The latter is the foremost collection of therapeutic writings from the Ashurbanipal Royal Library (7th century BCE), and the most important compendium of medical literature before Hippocrates. Moreover, cuneiform therapies against coughing phlegm as recorded on the Baghdad tablet bear unmistakable similarities to practices from the Hippocratic Corpus (post 4th century BCE). These sources offer a unique opportunity for medical historians, since we can now clearly see that therapies recorded in the Graeco-Roman world were in use in the Ancient Near East, even during the 2nd Millennium BCE.The project aims to scrutinize the Baghdad tablet in context. The Mesopotamian evidence will be compared and juxtaposed with similar practices from the Graeco-Roman world, but also beyond, since we are aware from other case studies that common therapies circulated throughout the ancient world. Furthermore, these similarities will be interdisciplinary discussed with real doctors, who will provide more medical context. The results will be published in a peer-reviewed paper.

The aim of the project is to explore whether and to what extent the Bulgarian Orthodox Church was part of the general trend, characteristic for other European churches (regardless of denomination), for taking part and supporting the modernization projects in their respective countries. The question seems to be important, on the one hand because it remains generally unexplored in the historical literature. It seems important also because nowadays the tradition of Church involvement in social work and modernization projects in Bulgaria is completely lost, mainly as a result of the official prohibition imposed on these activities by the communist authorities. Last but not least, because most of the contemporary Orthodox churches think of themselves as the custodians of an imagined conservative tradition and could hardly rethink their past in such a context.