Miglena Dikova-Milanova is a lecturer in Bulgarian language, literature, and culture at Ghent University, Belgium. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from KU Leuven, where she completed a dissertation on Kant and the cultural politics of the sublime. Her research interests include aesthetics and literary theory, cultural memory and nostalgia, nationalism, women’s writing in Eastern Europe and the Baltic region, and diaspora literature and culture. She coordinates the ENLIGHT project “Subversive Voices: Women, Identity, and Resistance in East European and Baltic Literature and Culture.”
She has published scholarly work on Kant’s philosophy, the writings of Karl Ove Knausgård, and Bulgarian and Russian literature. Her publications include “The Freedom of Kant’s Language of the Sublime in Contemporary Novels and Its Metacritique: On Don DeLillo’s ‘White Noise’ and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘The End’,” “Laughing at Cultural Difference: Aleko Konstantinov’s ‘Bay Ganyo’ and Alek Popov’s ‘Mission London’,” “The Poetics of Embodiment: Elisaveta Bagryana and Rade Drainac, a Love Affair,” and “Ending Your Father’s Novel: The Case ‘Theodora Dimova/Dimitar Dimov’”. She also contributes literary criticism, poetry, and essays on contemporary cultural issues to the Bulgarian Literary Newspaper (Literaturen vestnik).
Her latest poetry collection is Landscapes from the Edge of the World (Janet 45, 2025), and a Dutch translation of 4(four)2(two)na is forthcoming from Uitgeverij P in 2026. Alongside her academic work, she writes poetry and prose.