Dr. Albena Hranova (Pforzheimer Fellow, Mar – Jul ‘21) will present her research proposal on the topic:

Literature and Historiography: Public Scandals over Curricula and Textbooks in Bulgaria (1992–2019)

18 March, 2021 at 16:30 h.

Moderated by Tchavdar Marinov

—

Abstract

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.

Albena Hranova defended her PhD thesis in 1995 and in 1998 came her habilitation in Bulgarian literature. Since 2011 she is a full professor at the Department of Philosophy in the Faculty of Philosophy and History at Plovdiv University. Albena Hranova is the author of 150 articles published in Bulgarian, English, German, French, Czeck and Russian, and of the monoghraphs “The Two Bulgarian Literatures: The Limits of lyrical Context (1992), “The Person in Literature and His/Her Bulgarian Languages”(1995), “Approaches to the Fairy-Tale”(1998), “Language and Its Speeches”(2000), “Bulgarian Intertexts” (2002), “Historiography and Literature: On the Social Construction of Historical Concepts and Grand Narratives in 19th- and 20th-Century Bulgarian Culture “(Vol. I-II, 2011). She is also a co-author in nineteen manuals and textbooks in literature (2000-2020), and a member of the Editorial Board of Critique & Humanism.