Completed Programmes

RAGE (Hate Speech and Populist Othering in Europe: through the Racism, Age, Gender Looking Glass) is a comparative research project funded by the European Commission’s Directorate General Justice, under the Scientific Programme “Fundamental Rights and Citizenship”. The project examines populist political discourse and its effect on those “othered” by such discourse, particularly in the context of economic austerity and dwindling opportunities for young people.

A key objective of the project is to go beyond the usual discussions on the heuristics of historical regions and expand the toolkit of conceptual history by not just following a conceptual itinerary per se, but contextualizing this itinerary in terms of the changing political, cultural and especially disciplinary contexts. On the whole, this would help us "temporalize" our spatial terminology, and in turn, analyze the ways historical change is encapsulated by spatial categories.

The "Modernity and Identity" programme for independent research grants is financed by the Bulgarian Fund for Scientific Research and is intended to support young and excellent Bulgarian scholars from the field of the social sciences and the humanities with various thematic, disciplinary and methodological interests.

The “Regimes of Historicity” project has undertaken a comparative analysis of the various ideological traditions dealing with the connection between modernity and historicity, modernity and temporality, in three “small-culture” European regions: East-Central, Southeastern, and Northern Europe. It has aimed to reconstruct the ways in which different “temporalities” and time horizons produced alternative (national) representations of the past.

This two-year international interdisciplinary project aims to investigate the dynamics and especially the tendency towards deterioration of authority and social trust in the field of law in the overall context of globalisation, placing a special accent on the (European) post-totalitarian societies.

Eastern Enlargement – Western Enlargement. Cultural Encounters in the European Economy and Society DIOSCURI project focuses on current encounters in Europe to predict the convergence between the twin economic cultures of the “East” and the “West”. The research fields – entre­preneurship, governance and economic knowledge – are being explored in four East-Central European countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia) and in four countries of Southeast Europe (Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Serbia/Montenegro). The selection of the fields is based on the conviction that among the producers of economic culture, businesspeople, civil servants and economists exert a vast influence on the economic performance of the Union and the social cohesion between the old and the new member states. Instead of relying on a simplistic scheme, in which the “strong Western” culture devours the “weak Eastern” one, the Consortium expects to find a great variety of lasting cultural hybrids in economic and social behaviour. Thus, in an unprecedented way, Eastern Enlargement are being studied in conjunction with its neglected counterpart, Western Enlargement.

CAS History Club is a form of scholarly interchange, a kind of “advanced seminars”, attracting local scholars from a great many institutions. The society of the History Club, the first of its kind under the CAS roof, has by now established a tradition and a momentum of its own. Its focus-group sessions provide a forum for in-depth discussions of original historical research. Since the beginning of 2006 a new section “The Ottoman Balkans, 18th-19th centuries”, was launched in the framework of the Club. It is initiated and convened mainly by doctoral students affiliated to the Institute for Balkan Studies, Sofia University and the Institute of History.

Parallel to CAS’ successful guest-lecture programme with prominent international scholars, in 2006 the Centre launched its Bulgarian guest-lecture series under the title `Academic Dialogues`. The idea behind the series that is supported by the Bulgarian Ministry of Education and Science is to provide a presentation platform for vanguard and innovative research communities in Bulgaria working in the social sciences and humanities. Under the series CAS invites distinguished Bulgarian scholars and leaders of research groups to present the mission, the history, the activities and the research results of the group at the monthly ‘Academic Dialogues’ lecture. Besides the presentation of the academic group, the audience attracted by the series enjoys listening to a specialised lecture within the group’s area of research and representative of its methodology, and can participate in the vivid discussions concluding each event.