Completed Programmes

This is a project that will help for the development of a new course at the MA program of "Interpretative Anthropology" at the Faculty of Slavic Studies at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. The aim of the course is to initiate reflection in the MA students on Bulgarian culture of the 19th c. from the perspective of history of emotions. It will be an obligatory course, held in Bulgarian every fall semester of the academic year, starting from 2017/2018. Its design and goals are in accordance with the conceptual framework of the whole MA program to provide multidisciplinary methodological keys for interpretation of anthropological phenomena.

The project proposes to develop an educational board game for teaching higher order thinking skills (critical, metacognitive and creative thinking) and social skills (effective communication, confidence, leadership, teamwork) through the close reading of literary texts. The game will not be limited to one particular literary work, genre or approach – it will provide an expandable toolkit of analytical instruments, applicable to any literary text. Moreover, the game will not be limited to one particular level of instruction – the target audience of the project are university students, but it will also be possible to use with secondary school students and people outside the educational system.

The project is based on two major premises. First, traditional passive, content-based, teacher-dominated, individualistic forms of learning need to be counterbalanced by active, inquiry-based, student-centred, collaborative forms of learning. Second, the sense of freedom and enjoyment associated with play and games holds an enormous potential for enhancing learning and student engagement, which remains unused in higher levels of education.

Within the framework of the project the game will be created, tested in the classroom, its pedagogical effects will be measured and discussed in a research publication, and a model for assessing student participation will be proposed.

Against the background of the already long crisis of both the welfare state and neoliberalism, the social has been proclaimed as either dead, or as undergoing some kind of renaissance through social economy, civil society projects, and community (re)building and development. I propose, in this course, as a way of creating a meaningful "history of the present", a history of the social, focused on Central and Eastern Europe, but part of a larger European comparative and transnational approach. The social I plan to explore is not an essence, present whenever individuals gather and miraculously subsisting in their absence, but a project, instituted in various ways, with different tonalities, shapes, and histories.

In Central and Eastern Europe, a number of inter-mingled modern entities – nation, state, science, and the “social” – emerged, in new configurations, at the end of the nineteenth century. These modern looking beings travelled through various transnational networks: as discourses; political, financial, and scientific elites; diplomas and certificates; technologies, practices, habits, and fashions. All these fragments were reassembled in local contexts by elites anxious to solve their local problems but also to retain enough resemblance with how these entities were deemed to look in their original places of origin.

Leading – the largest, most profitable, innovative, and sustainable – companies, that is big business, have been in the focus of business history since the emergence of the field. However, concerning the industrial period, these studies have been based on data mostly from North America and Western Europe. My previous research demonstrated that the largest firms in the pre-World War I Russian Empire were large also by international standards, compared to the contemporary British, German, and French companies. Consequently, our understanding of global big business, its development and operation is distorted by the limited geographical scope of the data. In my proposed project, I intend to create a basis for a more comprehensive analysis of global big business before WWI by combining the already existing data from all over the world and including the largest Eastern European and Russian firms as well. The outcome will be an open-access dataset and an on-line interactive map of the world’s leading companies before WWI, as well as a research paper analyzing how the new information from Eastern Europe changes the global picture of big business. The online database and map are effective means to communicate the findings towards the international scholarship of the emergence of modern business enterprise. By this, the project aims to contribute to the integration of Eastern Europe into the study of a global history of business leadership and excellence in the past andpresent. Based on the research, I will prepare teaching materials for the course "History of Business in Eastern Europe and Russia in a Global Context."

The goal of the current project is to analyze the procedures related to the construction of communist ‘heritage’ in Eastern Europe, from the perspectives of the public debates surrounding its interpretation and valorization, and in the context of recent trends of teaching twentieth-century history in the European Union. Taking as a launching point the double-bound meanings of heritage as ‘legacy’ and ‘patrimony’ (that is, as ‘something given that has inevitably been received from the past,’ or as a ‘value that has to be transmitted to the future’), the project would explore the challenges in interpreting the artifacts of the communist period as ‘heritage’ and the ways in which these challenges are met in the different countries of Eastern Europe. Methodologically, the project will seek to juxtapose the fields of heritage studies and European studies and will utilize their potential in understanding the meanings of the communist pasts in present-day European context. Adhering to a wide comparative framework with different states of East Central and Southeastern Europe, the project will analyze diverse cases related to the construction of ‘heritage’ from the communist epoch and will reflect on the involvement of such cases in teaching materials of twentieth-century European history.

The radically transformative character of World War I cannot be overstated. The scale and character of the violence unleashed in 1914 was unprecedented not only in terms of military operations, but also in the social and political sphere. Recent historiography has increasingly turned to the Eastern European dimension of the war, highlighting the topics of imperial collapse, widespread social disruption, radical population politics and de-colonization as the major consequences of the conflict. The project focuses on these processes of (geo)political, social, ethno-national, and cultural transformation in order to provide a synthetic view on the history of the East European borderlands in wartime. The main goal of this project is to apply and transfer these trends in recent historiography to the case of the Russian-Romanian borderlands, from a comparative, regional and European perspective. The methodology of the project is indebted to the fields of empire studies, comparative and entangled history, discourse analysis, and symbolic geography, coupled with an explicit emphasis on the link between modernity, mass mobilization and violence that defined the transition from the imperial to the post-imperial order. The intended outcome of this project will be a PhD-level university course, to be taught within my home university’s doctoral program.