Индивидуални проекти

Транс-националности: консулите и създаването на модерните Балкани (1787 – 1908) разглежда ролята на консулските служби в създаването на национални държави, изграждането на нови икономически взаимодействия и възникването на модерни представи за гражданство на Балканите през деветнадесети век. Проектът има за цел да обедини прозрения и методи от историческата наука, градските изследвания, правото, икономиката и дигиталната хуманитаристика, за да анализира начина, по който консулските мрежи реконфигурират градските пространства в късната Османска империя и новите национални държави, възникнали в Югоизточна Европа. Търся отговор на въпроса каква е ролята на консулите в създаването на съвременните Балкани, изследвайки взаимовръзките между империализма, образуването на национални държави и формирането на нови понятия за гражданство.

Проектът е замислен като longue durée изследване на извънсъдебното задържане и лишаване от свобода в една отделно взета страна, което поставя по-широкия въпрос за репресивния потенциал на модерната държава. Проектът ще представлява първото цялостно изследване на интернирането на цивилни, концентрационните лагери и принудителния труд в България през ХХ век. Проучването има за цел да проблематизира съществуващия консенсус в българската историография за естеството на тези репресивни практики и институции като уникални само за тоталитарните диктатури, като предложи различна перспектива към техния произход, развитие и история в български контекст. Проектът, вдъхновен от все по-нарастващия брой изследвания на концентрационните лагери в световен план, ще интегрира българския случай в по-широка европейска и глобална перспектива.

The deep seabed contains several critical minerals for the future of humanity and the planet: copper, cobalt, nickel, zinc, as well as lithium and rare-earth elements. Over the next two decades, a substantial surge in the global consumption of these minerals and of the related mining activities is expected. The major reason for this comes for the upcoming low carbon energy transition. Despite these growing pressures, currently the exploitation of the deep seabed in not regulated: hence a framework to deep seabed governance is urgently needed. In light of these considerations, this project focuses on the governance properties and structures that deep seabed governance should include/be provided with in order to work in the public interest. Given the looming critical mineral’s mining threat, deep seabed governance risks being captured by the, possibly predatory, elites supporting the extractive industry. To obviate this danger, the project contends that deep seabed governance must be legitimate and procedurally just in order to gain standing, i.e., to be socially recognized as commanding respect. In particular, the project’s goal is to investigate and outline legitimate and procedurally just deep seabed governance with the standing necessary for it to work in the public interest.

In a period of state reconstruction and bureaucratization, non-Muslim officials' employment is an essential feature of the expanding modern Ottoman bureaucracy. It is a generally shared observation but has not been tested thoroughly by resorting to quantitative methods and archival materials. My project deals with a solid and consistent sample involving a coherent group with representative characteristics of the bureaucracy and its Christian and Jewish members. I recently completed a three-year-project aiming to identify non-Muslim officials. All Christians (Armenian, Greek, Bulgarian etc.) and Jews employed in the civil administration were part of the research spectrum. The statistical survey's primary basis was the personnel registers kept in 1879-1914, consisting of 201 large volumes that provided information on 52,000 Ottoman officials. We find out that almost 3.000 non-Muslims (5.7% of total) worked in the Ottoman civil service.Within this project's framework, Dr. Kirmizi will examine the social and educational backgrounds and careers of Christian officials. The aim is to better understand the Christian officials' position in the Ottoman bureaucracy and their roles in it.

Beginning in the eighteenth century (South Asia) and nineteenth century (Central Asia), an age of city-states gave way to an age of imperialism, which brought with it a new political form: the protectorate, a semi-colonial form of government characterized by indirect imperial rule. Local dynasts were left ostensibly in charge of their domain, but were also answerable to colonial authorities. As indirectly ruled territories of the British and Russian empires respectively, Hyderabad and Bukhara provide something of a natural experiment: structurally similar political entities enmeshed in a single culture of Perso-Islamic documentation. This project is thus at once comparative and transregional. How was the role of Islamic scholars transformed under indirect colonial rule? And how did semi-colonial status contribute to the development of characteristics that we associate with the modern state? Having already conducted important archival work in Russia, Uzbekistan, and India, this fellowship would provide a critical opportunity to begin drafting the book manuscript.

For centuries Troy and its tragic heroes served as exempla of audacious aggression, spectacular reversals of fortune, and migration as a regenerative force in history. In places as diverse as Madrid and Moscow, Britain and Bulgaria a fascination with Troy and its resilient refugees captured the imagination of medieval patrons. Ultimately, the story of Troy after antiquity foregrounds forced migration and cultural confrontations as cornerstones of the global historical process. Remarkably no comparative, cross-cultural study of medieval visual representations of Troy currently exists.Using unpublished and published illustrated manuscripts I am pursuing a new, interdisciplinary book project which focuses on intellectual and visual constructions of Troy in the medieval imagination. This project engages with such subjects as migration, imagined origins, usable pasts, trauma, gender tropes, and visualizations of violence.  This study moves well beyond the familiar Troy stereotypes such as the Trojan horse or Helen as the possessor of a ‘face that launched a thousand ships.’ This book is the first comparative, cross-cultural exploration of this subject across western medieval and eastern Christian cultural communities. I am applying for the Advanced Academia Fellowship in order to evaluate one of the most famous Bulgarian medieval manuscripts in comparative perspective. The Vatican Manasses manuscript (Vat. Slav. 2), which was produced for Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria in the mid-fourteenth century, features a fascinating visual adaptation devoted to Troy.

Mirjam's particular interest to explore here in Sofia, lies in Public Swimming Pools and Baths as places where people meet, where architecture tells us about the past and the present, and where the movements of the body and the behaviours tell us about the respective body cultures and (non)comfort zones.This is the starting point for her to investigate through swimming pools the importance of water, communities and rituals in an urban environment. For this, she wishes to dive into abandoned pools, still open ones, as well as into archives, and make and find images there to work with.

The project aims at studying the reception of Freudian psychoanalysis in Bulgaria in the period of 1947-1990, viewed through the optic of the psychoanalytic concepts of ‘repression’ and ‘resistance’ and the dialectic relation between them. The main hypothesis includes identifying those ‘places of repression’, existing at the level of discourse, in which the psychoanalytic ideas are stylized, refuted, denounced and rejected from the position of the official Marxist ideology taken as a framework for the sciences of mental health. Along with that, the hypothesis allows – without assuming – the existence also of ‘places of resistance’ in which the psychoanalytic ideas are integrated into an implicit or disguised form in the discourse of sciences, managing to circumvent ideological censorship. By means of an interdisciplinary methodology the project studies the modalities of relation between real repression and possible resistance both on the discursive level and on the level of the personal history and individual behaviour of certain figures who were involved in the subversive practicing of psychoanalysis in socialist Bulgaria. The final aim is not only to construct the concept of critical reception of psychoanalysis but also to reveal – in the meaning of values and philosophically – those meaning potentials of analysis that have made it become a ‘counter-discourse’ and a form of resistance against every (totalitarian) invasion on freedom and thinking.

The research project aims to explore a hitherto understudied perspective on Christian-Muslim relations in the premodern Ottoman society, namely the discourses on Balkan non-Muslims in Ottoman Muslim narrative sources produced between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries. It will cover a wide range of partly unpublished texts in the Ottoman Turkish and Persian languages falling according to their genre into the main categories of history, hagiography, geography, and travel accounts. By applying to the relevant accounts an interdisciplinary approach including historical, hermeneutic, text-critical, and codicological methods, the project will situate its findings within a larger sociological framework based on the concept of ‘interpretative communities’. The aim is to trace the sociopolitical implications of Muslim accounts of ‘the other’ as well as to provide a better understanding of how identities functioned and interacted in a premodern imperial setting.

The project reconstructs the history of the literary theory and criticism in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s and early 1930s in its close connection with the theoretical achievements of Russian formalism. The aim of the research is to demonstrate how the project of radical “modernization” of Ukrainian literature with the help of literary technique was used for the construction of the new national identity in the 1920s. The project deepens our understanding of political, cultural and intellectual history of Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s. On that basis, the cultural-historical and ideological context of the history of Ukrainian literary criticism and literature of the late 19th – first decades of the 20th century is consistently reconstructed. It offers a conceptually new reading of the literary and theoretical material of the 1920s. The success of this project will set a new benchmark in the historical narrative about modern and contemporary Ukraine. The project is based on the unique Ukrainian and Russian archival materials from the 1920s–1930s which are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time.