Theodora Dragostinova completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Athens, Greece, and her PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently an associate professor of history at Ohio State University where she teaches Eastern European and modern European history.
Dragostinova’s work is focused on state- and nation-building in eastern Europe through the examination of population management policies and cultural practices in a comparative and global perspective. She is the author of Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900-1949 (Cornell, 2011), which applies comparative and transnational methodology to the study of minorities and refugees in the Balkans and dissects the interplay between state demands and ordinary people’s priorities in the articulation of national policies. Her book was shortlisted for the Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies of the Association for the Study of Nationalities; and the Edmund Keeley Book Prize of the Modern Greek Studies Association. She is also the co-editor of Beyond Mosque, Church, and State: Alternative Narratives of the Nation in the Balkans (Central European University Press, 2016), which further contextualizes the alleged special role of the Balkan nation-state in the development of nationalism in the Balkans.
Dragostinova is currently working on a book-length manuscript entitled The Cold War from the Margins: Bulgarian Culture and the Global 1970s. This is a transnational study of the years of late socialism in Bulgaria through an examination of cultural politics and national commemorations. Based on research in Bulgaria, Hungary, Great Britain, Austria, Germany, France, and the United States, this book engages the global Cold War order through the experiences of a small state, Bulgaria, and its cultural engagements with the world. The book claims that viewed from a global perspective, those international cultural practices became the basis of contemporary cultural globalization as we know it today.