Current Programmes

The project explores Buddhist-Christian interactions between Tibet, Italy, and Bulgaria by examining the depiction of the Wheel of Life (Skt. bhāvacakra; Tib. srid pa'i 'khor lo) in the Alphabetum Tibetanum (1762) and its possible influence on Zahari Zograf’s mural at the Transfiguration Monastery (1849–1850). The Alphabetum Tibetanum, a comprehensive study of the Tibetan language and culture authored by the Italian Jesuit missionary and scholar Antonio Agostino Giorgi (1711–1797), contains one of the earliest European representations of the bhāvacakra. An engraving of the bhāvacakra from the Alphabetum Tibetanum became part of Zahari Zograf’s collection and is believed to have influenced the creation of the iconic Wheel of Life mural at the Transfiguration Monastery, a landmark in Bulgarian art. This research investigates the transmission of theological and visual motifs related to the Wheel of Life from its Tibetan origins through the Alphabetum Tibetanum to Eastern Orthodox Christian art, focusing on how Zograf’s mural may reflect Buddhist cosmological concepts. Through an interdisciplinary approach that combines historical, theological, and iconographical analysis with comparative study, the project examines the role of missionary scholarship and cross-cultural artistic exchanges in shaping religious iconography. By tracing these interactions, the study aims to provide new insights into the diffusion of Buddhist imagery within Christian contexts and the broader intellectual exchanges between Tibet, Catholic Europe, and Orthodox Bulgaria in the 18th and 19th centuries. Furthermore, by enhancing the understanding of Buddhist-Christian interactions in theology and art, the research will contribute to interreligious dialogue.

This project aims to investigate the position of New Religious Movements (NRMs) within Bulgaria’s power-imbalanced religious field, with a focus on their public portrayal. I argue that, in a post-secular situation emphatically dominated by a single law-protected religion, examining those in a minority position is essential for critically assessing the prospects for pluralism of faiths. Globally, NRMs frequently encounter tension with both established religious institutions and prevailing social norms due to their unconventional spiritual practices and ways of living. Investigating their perceived otherness—often reinforced by negative media labelling and discursive stigmatisation by the dominant religious milieu—provides valuable insight into broader societal attitudes towards religious diversity and tolerance. Accordingly, the study examines how NRMs are portrayed within Orthodox and secular media discourse in Bulgaria, particularly through the use of derogatory labels such as ‘sect’ and ‘cult’, and how these practices of othering affect their subjects. Employing a qualitative approach, the research combines a multimodal analysis of public representations with participant observations and semi-structured interviews with followers of selected NRMs to explore their lived experiences from a comparative perspective. It also offers a theoretical contribution by developing an empirically grounded typology of otherness, shedding light on stratifications and boundaries within the local religious field.

This project investigates the gender wage gap in Bulgarian industry during the first half of the twentieth century. The study examines the evolution of wage differentials between men and women in industrial employment, exploring the factors that contributed to the convergence of their wages over time. Drawing on extensive statistical data, archival and printed materials the project analyses how wars, economic shifts, technological changes, and political transformations influenced gender wage disparities. It also addresses the evolving discourse around gender wage justice and equal pay, considering the role of labour and social movements, collective agreements, state policies, and international labour standards. The project’s approach combines quantitative methods with historical analysis, shedding light on both the economic and social aspects of the gendered history of wages during a critical period in Bulgarian history. By focusing on a relatively underexplored intersection of labour history and women’s history in Bulgaria, this research aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the gendered nature of industrial labour, the political, economic, and social forces that shaped the labour market and the role of women in  it.

The proposed research project aims at exploring the ways in which nature in urban settings has been constructed as wild for the purpose of its’ protection in the case of two post-socialist cities in Southeastern Europe. Contemporary environmental discourse increasingly recognizes nature as an equal partner to the built environment in fostering climate-adaptive and ecologically sustainable urban settlements. Focusing on Sofia and Bucharest, the research critically assess the processes of “renaturalisation” and “rewilding” of the urban. The Boyana Marsh in Sofia, a natural wetland under pressure from private development, and Văcărești Nature Park in Bucharest, a wetland emerging from an abandoned socialist-era artificial lake project, share distinct physical histories yet have converging meanings as unique urban wildlands in the city, important for sustainable development and refuge for non-human species. The study is using critical cultural and urban studies approaches, such as oral history and discourse analysis to challenge the dominant narrative of “wild” post-socialist cities. It situates these processes within the broader context of Bulgaria's and Romania’s socialist legacies and their transitions to market economies and  democratic governance. The study hypothesizes that examining these cases jointly can reveal how discourses of climate change shape contemporary urban nature's construction and contestation.

The delegitimisation of foreign rulers plays a central role in Neo-Assyrian propaganda. In Assyrian texts, foreign rulers were characterised as blood-thirsty villains, who even killed their closest relatives, and as treaty-breakers, who ignored the warnings of gods and wise people. Thereby, the Assyrians had to intervene to restore a just world order. Even after defeating their enemies, the Assyrian propaganda continued ridiculing the foreign rulers. While the justification of the expansionistic policy of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (934–745 B.C.) has been studied in detail, no detailed study of the description and delegitimisation of foreign rulers has been conducted so far. The project will study the Neo-Assyrian narratives about and representations of foreign rulers and their authority. The research on Neo-Assyrian strategies of delegitimisation not only contributes to the field of Ancient Near Eastern Studies, but also to the fields of empire studies, political sciences, studies on propaganda, and the current discussion on hybrid warfare.

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.