Current Programmes

The project looks into the challenge of decentralised enforcement in core areas of the Internal Market, like competition law, consumer law and IP law. One way of ensuring coherence of decentralised enforcement has been through different types of enforcement networks. However, while the concept of ‘network’ presumes equivalence of interconnected units, in the regulatory areas at the centre of this project, there is considerable diversity in institutional design and governance approach among the EU Member States. Through a combination of theories and methodologies the project explores the impact of institutional diversity on the effectiveness of network governance and in turn, the implications of network governance for national institutional autonomy.

Phenomenology has historically accorded a privilege to temporality. In contrast, by scrutinizing the constitutive role of existential spatiality for human existence, this project defends the equiprimordiality between temporality and spatiality. I will present an outline of a “transcendental geology” of lived space, grounded on some leading phenomenological discourses – phenomenology of affectivity and corporeity, existential psychiatry and Daseinsanalysis, as well as hermeneutic phenomenology. If Heidegger’s project in Being and Time (1927) reveals the normative and axiological character of lived space, the particular problems of bodily nature [Leiblichkeit] and embodiment are left undiscussed in his early hermeneutic phenomenology. On the other side, Richir’s and Maldiney’s phenomenological projects outline an expanded scope of existential spatiality, proceeding from the questions regarding the origin of lived space and the consequences of deviated spatialization in abnormal psychic states of human life. Thus, the aim of the following research is to perform a methodological synchronization of the above-mentioned discourses in the form of architectonics of the existential spatiality, revealing the dimensionality of lived space as pre-condition for the original openness of the human existence to the world and to the other.

My post-doctoral project, entitled Greek in the Early Medieval Balkans 880-1014, will be the first social history of multilingualism in the Balkans and, in particular, of the role and significance of Greek after the late ninth-century arrival of the newly invented Slavonic alphabet. It will argue both that the Balkans were decidedly multilingual, contrary to scholarly consensus, and reveal how medieval multilingualism was manifested and experienced on the ground. This will be carried out through a mixed-method approach using manuscripts and epigraphic monuments, approached not simply as vessels for historical information, but as objects whose materiality is central to the formation of their meaning.

The research project is a comparative study of social mobility in the new towns, built in the 1950s and early 1960s in Bulgaria, former Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. It is a cross-European investigation into how these radical urban development projects, which aimed to improve social advance opportunities, were translated into reality. The research examines the similarities and divergences between East and West on the evolution of gender roles, the tensions between generations, old and new elites, rural and urban groups.After The Second World War new towns emerged across Europe on clear grounds. From the United Kingdom to the countries of the Communist Bloc, states engaged in sweeping projects of new town construction. Driven by pressing problems of urbanisation or urge to exploit natural resources, in almost all cases they were also aiming at boosting social mobility. The social history of these urban projects across have attracted attention - more significant regarding the Eastern Bloc and growing in the West. However the history of social mobility in new towns has never been seriously compared across national borders. The absence of comparative perspectives is somewhat paradoxical, since some parallels stand out clearly from the research in the East and the West. The investigations of these parallels are the research objectives of this project, aiming to discuss comparatively the nature, the effect and the renegotiation of the paradigms for equality, which motivated the new towns’ construction. It enquires if, how and for whom did the new towns provide social mobility in Europe across four division lines, visible from the extant literature: gender social mobility; social mobility between old and new elites, urban-rural social mobility, social mobility and generations.

The project will examine the dependencies in the triangle of bilateral relations between the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Habsburgs. The series of Ottoman-Safavid wars in the extremely vibrant period of the late 16th c. and early 17th c. temporarily hindered the military activity of the Porte in the Mediterranean and Central Europe. They were hence beneficial for both branches of the Habsburg dynasty – prime antagonists of the Ottoman advance to the West. Furthermore, the perception of the Ottomans as a common enemy lead to several ambitious plans for cooperation and anti-ottoman alliances.The project will explore how the Imperial court in Vienna/Prague understood the Ottoman-Safavid rivalry and tried to take advantage of it. By examining written sources, produced by the Habsburg court and its diplomatic network, the research will aim at outlining the degree of acquaintance with different aspects of the manifold bilateral relations between the two Muslim states. Due to the lack of permanent contacts between the Emperor and the Shah, it was the Habsburg intelligence in Istanbul that regularly provided Vienna/Prague with the latest information regarding the developments in the Ottoman-Safavid relations. The poorly studied crucial practices of collecting and delivering information and its vital importance for the decision-making process will come to light.

The proposed research project offers an interdisciplinary model for analyzing artificial intelligence (AI)—through a study of its treatment in contemporary art (primarily literature and film/TV). It seeks to provide a robust foundation for thinking about the future of intelligence by engaging with promising methods and theories in current AI research and adapting them to the apparatuses of disciplines from the humanities and social sciences. This interventention is meant to facilitate the transfer of analytical knowledge between scholarly fields as varied as AI research, philosophy, sociology, and literary studies; it aims to create mental space for conceptual cross-pollination and methodological innovation. The assembled theoretical and methodological apparatus will be evaluated against close readings of a wide range of contemporary speculative fictions (SF) involving AI characters or narrators. SF is seen as a material-semiotic space for thought experimentation at various scales: it permits the kind of imaginative work which is necessary in the invoked disciplines, whenever complex counterfactual scenarios need to be modeled. SF offers a unique advantage in this respect, since it combines parameters for world modeling that are of interdisciplinary interest, and since a wide range of analytical tools have already been developed and adapted to analyze it.

Feminisms have always liked the body. The reason is somewhat reactionary, and the reaction is largely forgotten throughout centuries. It is rooted in Aristotle’s hylomorphism and its identification of the feminine principle with ugliness. Embracing this identification becomes the locus classicus of feminist philosophy’s project to institute femininity as both embodied and rational. Two sources have inspired feminist theorists to reduce and thus defend philosophical femininity as symptomatically embodied: Plotinus (Enneads, III.6) and Irigaray’s interpretation of him (Speculum of the Other Woman). In this project I critique Irigaray’s reading as central to demystifying the reduction of femininity to embodiment. My aim is to then build on this critique and offer a trajectory of interpreting femininity and womanhood as equally relevant to the Plotinian ideal of disembodiment which has traditionally been in turn reduced to a masculine project.

Bulgarian psychiatric history is, to a significant extent, an empty spot. What exists locally pertains to sanitized history written by psychiatrists themselves. The lasting impression, is they cannot, or do not, want to say what has happened, what has been the private, political, material, scientific, life of the psychiatric field. The first objective would be to reconstruct the boundary maintaining mechanisms of the socialist psychiatry in Bulgaria. The second objective would be to trace the intersections of several different lines of development– juridical framework, type and dynamics of the services, the “material” milieu. The third objective is to throw some light on issues which were among the forbidden topics during the period – suicide and psychiatric abuse. Not many documentsabout psychiatry have been preserved, archives have been destroyed, and there was ideological pushing forward of people without real contribution and the contribution of others was ignored, especially from the period before 1944. The study will use as many sources as possible and combine various qualitative methods, including archival material, and key professional journals during the period, medical press. Another source of data would be interviews conducted with representatives of the generation, whose professional lives are situated predominantly in the socialist period.

The aim of the project is to research the competition and cooperation of state and commercial interests of key Russian and Bulgarian Governmental and entrepreneurial actors as a driver for long-term development of maritime infrastructure in the Black Sea region - the ports of Varna and Odessa. The objects of the research are The Russian Steam Navigation and Trading Company (founded in 1856) and the Bulgarian Commercial Steam Navigation Company (founded 1893). The studied period is between 1856 and the beginning of the WWI. The hypothesis of the study is that the construction of maritime infrastructure is a hybrid project, the result of simultaneous confrontation and negotiation of presented as a common good strategies of Governmental and Imperial actors and the commercial interests of entrepreneurs and merchants. The transfer of knowledge is also important. This approach to the development of infrastructure explicates the complex character of the modernization processes, in which the two modernization lines – through “top down” state intervention and by “down up” entrepreneurship and trade activities are entangled, in constant tension and negotiation. The project follows the methodological frame of entangled modernities. The proposed method is interpretative analysis of official and personal documents, related to the two companies.