Текущи програми

The proposed research project aims to investigate the structure of the communal life of the Jewish minority in Byzantium and the religious identity of its members. Personal piety was an important factor in shaping the daily life of Jews and indicated the way the Jewish community was organised and functioned in the larger Christian environment of the Byzantine Empire. The public expression of personal piety by Jews and Christians reflected the absence of separation between the two groups, which, in turn, prompted the ongoing involvement of Jews in the broader life of the cities where they lived, even despite the reaction against Judaism and Jewish religious influence among Christians under Justinian I (527–565) and the forcible baptism of Jews under Heraclius (610–644). The project will cover the period between the fourth century and the end of the eighth century, which will allow the inclusion of the widest possible selection of epigraphic and historical sources. Geographically, the project will include evidence from the Balkans and the Aegean, which is less studied and requires a new investigation and analysis.

The rationale for this project is grounded in the recognition that the most significant transnational political development concerning democratic states in the 21st century is the rise of populism. The study pursues three principal objectives. First, to provide a comprehensive conceptualization and in-depth analysis of a distinct variant of populism, herein defined as “conservative populism.” Second, to elucidate the features that render this phenomenon detrimental to the legitimacy of the European Union (EU), while offering a critical examination of its ideational core. Third, to develop better theoretical justification and more compelling normative defence of EU’s legitimacy. The destabilizing effects of conservative populism are especially pronounced in the former communist countries of East Central Europe (ECE) that acceded to the EU after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The successful realization of this project’s objectives would facilitate the identification of a substantive threat to the consolidation of these recent democracies. The enduring salience of conservative populism across EU states underscores the relevance of this inquiry. Its trajectory - whether characterized by continued expansion or effective containment - will depend on the extent to which theoretical insights, such as those advanced in this study, are translated into practical and policy-oriented responses.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.