Former Fellows

The project explores the predicament of Bulgarian cultural and artistic intelligentsia in the unexplored post-socialist period when, for the first time in their two-century history, intellectuals were becoming uniquely insignificant figures. The project is envisioned as a social–historical and cultural analysis of how Bulgarian intellectuals, artists, writers, poets, and filmmakers experienced first the liberal-intellectual and then the social revolution engendered by the transition from state socialism to neol-iberal capitalism. It explores the paradox that while East European intellectuals and dissidents were instrumental in the demise of communism, it was ironically under neo-liberal democracy that they were relegated to a life of cultural and social irrelevance. Methodologically, the project will weave an economic analysis of the impact of the new market economy on intellectual and artistic production together with a cultural analysis of intellectual and artistic reactions to the cultural and political transformations of the 1990s and 2000s. Examining intellectuals’ attitudes towards such issues as nationalism, pro-EU or pro-US sentiment, political activism, and post-communist nostalgia, this project seeks to understand how the marginalization of the intelligentsia has affected not only post-1989 cultural and intellectual life, but also social and political mobilization.