Период на активност: 2019 – 2027
Email: [email protected]
Стипендиите „Пфорцхаймер“ (2019–2027) осигуряват всяка година три 5-месечни стипендии за утвърдени български учени (Pforzheimer Senior Fellowships). Те се финансират и носят името на американския филантроп г-н Карл X. Пфорцхаймер III, библиофил и спомоществовател на Центъра за академични изследвания София.
This research project investigates the constitution and everyday meanings of ‘charisma’ among Roma women, contributing to broader debates on the intersections of gender, leadership, and social change within Roma evangelical communities. Central to the study is the role of evangelical Christianity, one of the most widespread religions among marginalized populations, in shaping spiritual authority and community dynamics. The project aims to document and analyze diverse manifestations of female authority and to develop a nuanced understanding of ‘charisma’, particularly as it relates to expressions of modern spirituality and under-explored forms of religious experimenting. In the context of evangelicalism, ‘charisma’, as a perceived materialization of God’s grace, is deeply embedded in leadership dynamics. While often associated with male religious figures, this research highlights how ‘charisma’ is also expressed by women, both within Pentecostal and non-Pentecostal contexts. This is particularly distinctive in the Roma communities of Bulgaria, where academic scholarship on female charismatic leadership remains limited. The study uses both historical and ethnological approaches. To develop a comparative perspective, the project will analyze examples of female charismatic authority from Bulgaria and compare them with cases from Slovakia and Spain.
Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) was a Muslim theologian and jurist, one of the most influential representatives of the Hanbalite theological and legal school in Sunni Islam. As such, his work has been extensively studied in the context of Islamic theology and the Islamic religious law Sharī a. This project aims to examine Ibn Taymiyya’s work from a different andʽ previously unexplored perspective: that of translation studies. To this end, it will identify the texts from his works in which the main elements of his understanding of translation are presented. Critical analysis of the texts will reveal Ibn Taymiyya’s place in the history of Arabic translation discourse and facilitate the presentation of his understanding of translation. He perceives it both as a historical process of interlinguistic transfer and as an analytical category that enables the exploration of divergences within the Islamic culture and identifies differences between Islam and other epistemological and religious traditions.
Сравнителен и интердисциплинарен анализ на текстове от второто хилядолетие пр. Хр. в Месопотамия
Страхил В. Панайотов (2023 - 2024)
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.
Българската православна църква като модернизационен фактор между двете световни войни
Момчил Методиев (2023 - 2024)
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.
The project “The Two “Great Games”: “Homo Ludens” in Central Asia” has been born out of the applicant’s experience of research of international politics in post-Soviet Central Asia. The pervasiveness of the label “the new “Great Game” linking the nowadays developments in Central Asia with the Anglo-Russian rivalry of the 19th century has made me question the “ludic” dimension of international politics in this region. The project would try to reveal why and how the metaphor of the “Great Game” has become so entrenched in the analyses of international politics in Central Asia; what this historical analogy elucidates and what it obfuscates; what it means for practical policy-making. The project would also raise fundamental questions: does the “game” reference imply that there might be some “rules of the game”? Does it hint that there is something “not quite serious”, something “ludic” about the international politics of Central Asia?The project would expand our knowledge of how and under what conditions the academic and political representations of Central Asia developed and crystallized. It would help, in this particular case, to narrow the gaps separating the philosophy of politics, international relations theory and area studies.
Muslim b. al-Ḥajjāj of Nishapur (d. 261 H/875 CE) is famous for his al-Musnad al-ṣaḥīḥ (The Sound collection). The Ṣaḥīḥ is a compilation of traditions (ḥadīth) going back to the Prophet Muḥammad (d. 11 H/632 CE) that Sunni Muslims regard as the third most authoritative source of legal norms after the Qurʾān and Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl al-Bukhārī’s (194–256 H/810–70 CE) ḥadīth collection al-Jāmiʿ al-ṣaḥīḥ. Muslim ranks among the founders of the science of ḥadīth criticism. Despite his renown, Muslim’s life and works came only sporadically to the attention of Western ḥadīth scholarship while arabophone studies have been restricted by the apologetic perception of Muslim.The present project studies Muslim’s life, works, theology, and method in ḥadīth criticism based on a wide range of biographical sources and ḥadīth collections. These sources are studied by a variety of text-critical approaches, including the method of ‘compilation criticism’. For the first time Muslim’s theological views are studied in a systematic manner, which offers a glimpse in the development of the early Sunni theology. Four works by Muslim that were considered lost will be reconstructed from hitherto neglected later sources. A detailed study of the transmission of Muslim’s Ṣaḥīḥ is part of the project, which is expected to result in the publication of a peer-reviewed article and a monograph about Muslim in English.
Магията в епохата на Просвещението: средновековните книжни амулети като учебни помагала в българското образование през XVIII–XIX век
Ангел Николов (2021 - 2022)
The project focuses on the late transformations, marginalization and disappearance of an older medieval tradition characteristic of the culture of Orthodox Bulgarians, Serbs and Vlachs: the copying and carrying as apotropaia of small–format manuscript miscellanies (‘book amulets’) containing Slavic translations of various apocrypha, prayers, as well as calendar, divination, prognostic, medicinal and other works, each perceived as a textual amulet. In the 18th and 19th centuries, these ‘magical’ texts were frequently used to teach children, but the practice was gradually discontinued with the development of a modern school system based on printed textbooks and dominated by secular teachers dedicated to modernizing Bulgarian society along pro–European, rational and pragmatic lines. However, interest in this type of literature declined slowly due to the strong belief in its special protective powers, as evidenced by the numerous printed editions of some of the most popular textual amulets in the form of small pamphlets of the second half of the 19th century. Thus, the project aims to explore, by means of a case study, how the modernization of society sealed the fate of some traditional worldviews and beliefs whose roots could be traced back to the cultural traditions of the ancient Middle East and the Greco–Roman Mediterranean.
Между носталгията и отрицанието: как да разбираме социалната промяна в социалистическа България
Мартин Иванов (2021 - 2022)
Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall Bulgarians are still on the crossroad between nostalgia and negation, seemingly unable to construct an overall picture of their socialist past. Importantly, we still lack a thorough study on the characteristics of social change that was accomplished by the socialist regime.Understanding the dynamics, the magnitude, and the thoroughness of the social change, which transformed Bulgarian society in the half-century after the World War II would be the prime task of this research project. Due to various reasons it would restrain from the conventional approach and instead would go along the new current in the academic literature, which applies alternative measures of standard of living like (1) real wages, (2) infant mortality, (3) life expectancy at birth, (4) daily calories intake, and (5) anthropometric data (height and weight) of children and adolescents.Given the near-complete infancy of Bulgarian research on the subject it would be naïve to pretend that it could master a full understanding of the social change. Rather, this proposal is a first stage of a larger and continuous research which has to be confined to a less ambitious scouting exercise for mapping the data scene and initial analysis of the preliminary findings.
Литература и историогафия: публични скандали върху учебното съдържание в България(1992–2019)
Албена Хранова (2020 - 2021)
This project is designed to study the Bulgarian public scandals in the 1992–2019 period related to education in history and literature. After the end of communist rule, education had to undergo institutional depoliticization until the development of new curricula; such were elaborated in 1999–2000, and then in 2016. The five major scandals to be studied under this project erupted consecutively in three stages and bound, in a different way, history and literature together into a common field of national mythology where public opinion formulated its notions of “truth” and “manipulation”, values, national ideals, and so on. Those symptomatic scandals have not been studied in their own right to date, and, besides, public opinion surveys on education issues are a recent phenomenon not only in Bulgaria.
Using interdisciplinary research methods and main concepts such as public space of history, conceptual history, national mythology, and text figuratives to analyse the public language of the scandals in question, the project aims to reconstruct the plots of those scandals with a view to their concrete political contexts; to observe the viewpoints of the institutions involved and the public reactions, and the specific points of their intersections and correspondence; to identify their impact on institutional policies; to take into consideration their long-term resonance in the statements of public opinion in Bulgaria.
Един различен подход във философската антропология: да промислим човешкото през неговите антоними
Христо Стоев (2020 - 2021)
This is a project in the sphere of philosophical anthropology to be conducted mainly through the methods of ordinary language philosophy, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. It builds on a simple thesis. In order to think through the human in general and to understand our own self-reflective cultural image as humans, we need to consider what we comprehend as opposite or even just different from the human: the inhuman and the nonhuman. As suggested by the two very different words in English our intuitions in this semantic field are divided into two basic types. On one hand, these are intuitions oriented towards that which the human is not (the nonhuman) and on the other hand intuitions towards that which the human should not be (the inhuman/e). These layers respectively reveal the descriptive and normative modes of our thinking on the human condition. The intuitions in question need to be philosophically conceptualized in order to understand their scope, limits, and claim to universality. Thus light can be thrown on the very recent ideas that seem to question our commitment to the humanist ideas. This should provide a more clear-cut interpretation of what it means to strive for a trans-humanist or a post-humanist world.
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