Kristina Nikolovska is currently a specialist in Church Slavonic manuscripts and early printed books at the National and University Library “St. Clement of Ohrid” – Skopje. Her research focuses on the textual traditions of early modern Southeast Europe and is informed by concerns in book history, manuscript studies and philosophy of historical writing.
Nikolovska was awarded the Europe Next to Europe (ENTE) research fellowship at the New Europe College – Institute for Advanced Study (Bucharest) for the academic year 2015 / 16. In March 2016 she was a visiting scholar at the Hilandar Research Library/The Ohio State University. She has been invited to give talks at Central European University, The Ohio State University and The British Library. Her current research project, Churchmen on the Move: Memories of Exile and the Ottoman Empire (1400-1600), examines the concept of exile as represented in narratives drawn from early modern South Slavic religious diaspora.
In November 2015, she received her joint doctoral degree in Text and Event in Early Modern Europe (TEEME) from the University of Kent (The United Kingdom) and Freie Universität Berlin (Germany). Her doctoral thesis ‘Let it be known’: Interrogating Historical Writing in Church Slavonic paratexts of Southeastern Europe (1371-1711) – which is currently being revised into a book – explores how South Slavic clergymen represented Ottoman power in the margins of their religious books. The thesis makes an argument that the invocation of eschatological themes within the corpus of marginalia reflect the relations between the Ottoman administration and the religious polity of the South Slavs. She also holds a master’s degree in Identity, Culture and Power from the University College London (UCL), the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies (SSEES).
Selected publications:
- “Tsar or Son of Perdition: South Slavic Representation of Ottoman Imperial Authority in Church Slavonic Paratextual Accounts”. Revue des études sud-est européennes, LIV, 1-4 (autumn 2016): 75-86.
- “‘When the living envied the dead’: Church Slavonic paratexts and the apocalyptic framework of monk Isaija’s colophon (1371)”. In: Tracing Manuscripts in Time and Space through Paratexts, ed. by G. Ciotti and H. Lin (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016): 185-221.