Theodora Dragostinova completed her undergraduate studies at the
University of Athens, Greece, and her PhD at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently an associate professor of history
at Ohio State University where she teaches Eastern European and modern
European history.
Dragostinova’s work is focused on state- and nation-building in eastern
Europe through the examination of population management policies and
cultural practices in a comparative and global perspective. She is the
author of Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the
Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900-1949 (Cornell, 2011), which applies comparative
and transnational methodology to the study of minorities and refugees
in the Balkans and dissects the interplay between state demands and
ordinary people’s priorities in the articulation of national policies.
Her book was shortlisted for the Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism
and Ethnic Studies of the Association for the Study of Nationalities;
and the Edmund Keeley Book Prize of the Modern Greek Studies
Association. She is also the co-editor of Beyond Mosque, Church, and
State: Alternative Narratives of the Nation in the Balkans (Central
European University Press, 2016), which further contextualizes the
alleged special role of the Balkan nation-state in the development of
nationalism in the Balkans.
Dragostinova is currently working on a book-length manuscript entitled
The Cold War from the Margins: Bulgarian Culture and the Global 1970s.
This is a transnational study of the years of late socialism in Bulgaria
through an examination of cultural politics and national
commemorations. Based on research in Bulgaria, Hungary, Great Britain,
Austria, Germany, France, and the United States, this book engages the
global Cold War order through the experiences of a small state,
Bulgaria, and its cultural engagements with the world. The book claims
that viewed from a global perspective, those international cultural
practices became the basis of contemporary cultural globalization as we
know it today.