MA in History; PhD in History (University of Toronto, Canada)
Affiliation: Institute of Communication, Culture, Information & Technology, Centre for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto, Canada
Field of Study: History and Narrative Non-Fiction.
Between 2006 and 2019, I recorded forty interviews with survivors from the Bulgarian gulag. I employed a methodology based on the “life-stories” model of oral history, developed by the Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University. This approach aims at extending the interview beyond the narrative of atrocity to a more in-depth account of each person’s experience. Thus, the project’s findings also shed light on the identity formation of survivors of violence during the communist period and the transitional years. Additionally, one of the main goals of the oral history project was to capture the experience of both men and women, and in this instance, gender played a particularly important role in how people lived through repression. What remains certain and undisputed is that for all of the interviewees, repression is a continued experience, one that outlasts the release from a camp or a prison. All of the men and women who shared their stories are invariably and forever marked by their internment. During my tenure at CAS, I will integrate the testimonies that I collected, together with other personal writings, memoirs and diaries, and video recordings of former camp and prison inmates. This project will result in my second scholarly monograph titled, Survivors Remember: Ethnography and Oral History, a history of the recorded life-stories and personal archives of Bulgarian gulag survivors.
