Current Programmes

Skriabin’s Myth and Music investigates the legacy of composer Aleksandr Skriabin in twentieth-century Russian culture. It opens with the creation of the myth of Skriabin as a madman and messiah in the 1910s and then moves to the Soviet appropriation of Skriabin’s work in the 1920s when it merged with the cult of electricity and was interpreted as a prophecy of the Revolution. The manuscript next examines the posthumous influence of Skriabin’s work on the poetics of six major Russian authors (Ivanov, Zamiatin, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Sharov) and explores Skriabin’s sway over Russian émigré communities in Berlin and Paris (Bely, Kandinsky, Obukhov, Vyshnegradsky). I then trace how Skriabin’s ideas inspired Soviet multimedia technologies and art linked to space exploration, such as the 1957 photoelectronic synthesizer ANS used to evoke the sound of the alien planet in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris and the light-sound art for Soviet cosmonauts developed by engineer-artist Bulat Galeev at the Kazan Prometheus Institute. I finally explore how these artists aspired to stage a synaesthetic apocalypse, and I develop a related article on Vladimir Sharov’s and Georgi Gospodinov’s synaesthetic apocalypses. My manuscript ultimately contends that Russian artists perpetuated Skriabin’s synaesthetic work to transform him into a cultural icon.

The need for a reform of the EU’s enlargement policy under the pressure of the geopolitical circumstances has been clearly recognised by both researchers and experts (Börzel 2023; Schimmelfennig 2023a; Schimmelfennig 2023b; Sydow & Kreilinger 2023; Nizhnikau & Moshes 2024). This effort requires a shift in the cognitive perspective, as most of the studies in the field have been constrained by the framework of the dominant rationalist approach, which was a) designed before the Eastern enlargement began, and b) aimed at universal theoretical understanding (Sedelmeier 1996; Schimmelfennig 1996; Sedelmeier 2011). The specificities of the postcommunist societies, conceived by major actors in this enlargement as "a different beast altogether" (Landaburu 2007), were omitted. We aim to change the mental map in thinking about EU enlargement by highlighting the fundamental logic of the enlargement methodology through its practical manifestation in the EU’s enlargement packages. We will apply a complex qualitative-quantitative analytical methodology to go beyond the official statements in the country reports and reach a systematic structure of key policy characteristics. This knowledge will allow for some fundamental changes in the EU approach towards future enlargements, aiming at qualitatively different results in much more successful Europeanisation of the applicant countries.

There is no police violence in Bulgaria. This seems to be the consensus crafted by a wide and dispersed set of politicians, journalists, and even social media users. Yet, multiple lawsuits against Bulgaria were won at the European Human Rights Court; a psychologist from the Ministry of Interior admits on TV that the problem with police violence might be become systemic; and once in a few years, a scandal errupts because of alleged misuse of power on the part of police officers. While a handful of activists and NGOs try to keep tabs on police violence in the country, this remains an uphill battle since there is no official statistics and no accepted definition of key concepts such as “police violence” or “police harassment”. This project seeks to understand the meanings which a variety of stakeholders—journalists, victims, lawyers, and police officers—ascribe to “police violence” and what are the strategies through which these stakeholders make or unmake the category of “police violence” itself. To do so, the project employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, including interviews, discourse and text analysis, and basic statistics.

Ever since the Upper Palaeolithic, communities have been making miniature figures, with a peak in figurine usage in the Balkan Neolithic - Chalcolithic (6200 – 3500 cal BC). While endlessly fascinating, these figurines remain enigmatic. The principal shift in approach has been from “What did these figurines mean?” to “What do these figurines do?” – viz., studies of performance and figurine agency. Many see figurines as vehicles for exploring people’s relationships with human bodies. Yet in the last two decades, the pendulum has swung towards agency and away from meaning, leading to a lack of integration of research results. This state of affairs offers an opportunity for new research in which context is central, performance is meaningful and human and object agencies are in dialogue. My main research question is “how were figurines embedded in domestic and mortuary performances through time and space in prehistoric Bulgaria?” I shall answer this question by studying reports on figurine assemblages and first-hand examination of some figurine collections in Bulgarian museums in order to discover the figurines’ depositional circumstances and performative roles. The output would be a chapter in an invited book in the Cambridge Elements “Archaeology and Gender” series on “Female figurines in European prehistory”.

This interdisciplinary project studies the geological exploration of the Balkan Peninsula, focusing on the descriptions and analyses of thermal water that were produced by traveling naturalists and scientists from the beginning of the sixteenth century until the end of the nineteenth. Placing the texts in their proper historical contexts and considering the authors’ agendas and the broader developments within the travel writing genre, the project examines how the exploration of the geology and thermal hydrology of the Balkans was situated in the overall study of the peninsula and what role it played in shaping the travelers’ perceptions of Balkan societies and cultures. I look into how Southeast Europe’s affinity for the healing and sacral properties of spring water informed Western travelers’ perceptions of the region as ‘other’ vis-à-vis the places they were coming from and how the study of the hydrothermal landscapes of the Balkans influenced the formation of a comprehensive image of the region. I use insights from cultural geography and anthropology to show how thermal water played an essential role in place-making in the Balkans and how its scientific exploration was ultimately linked to the study of human culture.

This research explores the dynamics of Bulgarian archaeology during the communist period and the Transition years (1944–2007), examining the profound influence of political ideologies on archaeological research, scientific interpretations and social implications. It is innovative for Bulgarian historiography, as the subject is challenging due to the difficulty of objectively assessing such a recent past. The proposed research is a multifaceted endeavour that requires a comprehensive approach. It aims to examine a wide range of issues, problems and key features, encompassing the historical background of Bulgaria during the communist period and beyond, political ideologies, state institutions and control, international relations, and the influence of political policies on the conservation and management of Bulgaria's archaeological heritage. The proposed research will be organised in several phases according to its main objectives. Using a variety of research methods, including archival studies and comparative analysis with other Eastern European countries, the study aims to stimulate scholarly discourse and inspire further research into Bulgaria's complex scientific past. Ultimately, the project will culminate in a monograph that will synthesise the findings to enrich our understanding of this fascinating historical period.

This research project seeks to comprehensively explore the overlooked and forgotten Turkish literature produced within Communist Bulgaria from 1944 to 1968. Despite comprising approximately one hundred poetry books, long stories, and novels during this period, these Turkish texts have been largely neglected by both Bulgarian and Turkish scholars, remaining mere entries in bibliographies. The primary aim of this research is to unravel the complex interplay between Turkishness, Muslimness, socialism, and peasantism as reflected in these (selected) Turkish literary works published in Bulgaria during the Cold War era. Specifically, this research focuses on texts released by the state-sponsored publishing house, Narodna Prosveta, from 1959 to 1968, as well as contributions to the monthly magazine Yeni Hayat (New Life) (1953-60) and its literary supplement, Çağdaş (Modern). By conducting literary and sociocultural analyses within the context of ideological upheavals during the Cold War, this project aims to illuminate the unique and uneven development of minority literature in Bulgaria. Additionally, it employs archival research to enhance understanding of the relationship between socialism, nationalism, the idea of the land, and Turkish literary culture within this specific historical framework. Furthermore, by conducting a comparative examination between Bulgaria and Turkey—neighboring countries aligned with opposing ideological blocs during the Cold War—the research enriches our comprehension of the diverse trajectories of Turkish literature under contrasting ideological regimes.

Post-socialist Bulgaria was haunted by poltergeists, visited by aliens, and awash with ‘phenomena’ of various kinds. Why were these alternative forms of knowing the world proliferating in the first decades of ‘democracy’? This project combines the histories of late socialism with new research into the post-socialist period to explore the intersection of official and unofficial science and knowledge-making communities. Utilizing archival documents, analysis of literature, digital tools, and oral history, it will uncover the role of socialist science and narratives in the shaping of post-1989 narratives around Bulgarian ‘uniqueness’ but also esoteric expectations about spirits, energies, and aliens. It argues that the print and digital culture of the post-1989 period enabled amateur communities to claim scientific expertise in novel ways, often utilizing but obscuring the theories’ origins in earlier periods. Who could claim truth and how did they defend it? More so, why was post-socialist Bulgaria receptive to such ideas and why do publics continue to flock to and fund such communities? Building on existing literature about both the lost utopias of socialism and the ways post-crisis societies deal with meaning and disenchantment (from political narratives), this project bridges the 1989 divide in political and cultural language in novel ways.

When we ask ourselves what are the objects of our visual perception, the most intuitive answer that comes to mind is that we perceive the things that constitute our reality or external world, e.g. buildings, trees, tables, etc. In philosophy of perception, this account came to be known as common sense realism, naïve realism or direct realism. Regardless of its intuitiveness, however, direct realism nowadays has close to none supporters to endorse it.

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.