Individual projects

The proposed research project aims to investigate the structure of the communal life of the Jewish minority in Byzantium and the religious identity of its members. Personal piety was an important factor in shaping the daily life of Jews and indicated the way the Jewish community was organised and functioned in the larger Christian environment of the Byzantine Empire. The public expression of personal piety by Jews and Christians reflected the absence of separation between the two groups, which, in turn, prompted the ongoing involvement of Jews in the broader life of the cities where they lived, even despite the reaction against Judaism and Jewish religious influence among Christians under Justinian I (527–565) and the forcible baptism of Jews under Heraclius (610–644). The project will cover the period between the fourth century and the end of the eighth century, which will allow the inclusion of the widest possible selection of epigraphic and historical sources. Geographically, the project will include evidence from the Balkans and the Aegean, which is less studied and requires a new investigation and analysis.

The rationale for this project is grounded in the recognition that the most significant transnational political development concerning democratic states in the 21st century is the rise of populism. The study pursues three principal objectives. First, to provide a comprehensive conceptualization and in-depth analysis of a distinct variant of populism, herein defined as “conservative populism.” Second, to elucidate the features that render this phenomenon detrimental to the legitimacy of the European Union (EU), while offering a critical examination of its ideational core. Third, to develop better theoretical justification and more compelling normative defence of EU’s legitimacy. The destabilizing effects of conservative populism are especially pronounced in the former communist countries of East Central Europe (ECE) that acceded to the EU after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The successful realization of this project’s objectives would facilitate the identification of a substantive threat to the consolidation of these recent democracies. The enduring salience of conservative populism across EU states underscores the relevance of this inquiry. Its trajectory - whether characterized by continued expansion or effective containment - will depend on the extent to which theoretical insights, such as those advanced in this study, are translated into practical and policy-oriented responses.

The project examines the development of education in Bulgarian Exarchate schools between 1878 and 1912 within the political, legal, and administrative framework of the late Ottoman Empire. This period represents a crucial phase in the transformation of Bulgarian education, marked by the coexistence of ecclesiastical traditions, emerging national institutions, and pedagogical modernization. The project seeks to demonstrate that the Bulgarian Exarchate schools shaped educational norms and influenced Bulgarian education beyond the borders of the Bulgarian state. While existing historiography has devoted considerable attention to the political and nation-building role of the Bulgarian Exarchate, the internal pedagogical dynamics of Exarchate schools have often been examined fragmentarily or mainly from an institutional perspective. This project addresses this gap by analysing Exarchate schools as pedagogical environments in which ideas were articulated through curricula, regulations, and everyday practices shaped by the Ottoman administrative context. The project further argues that, despite operating within the Ottoman Empire and outside the Bulgarian educational system, Exarchate schools functioned as transregional pedagogical spaces facilitating the circulation of teachers, textbooks, and educational models between Ottoman territories and Bulgaria. Through transfer and adaptation, Exarchate education contributed to the modernization of Bulgarian schooling and to broader debates on education in Southeastern Europe.

As the last thirty years have been a time of massive nationalization and de-Sovietization of culture in the former republcs, the institutional infrastructure and even the memory of Multinational Soviet literature (MSL) have been largely erased. In recent years, however, Slavic studies in the West have shown greater interest in MSL for both its role as a massive and influential instance of world literature and for the postcoloniality of its constituent literatures. Written in over 70 languages, over the course of over 70 years, however, MSL remains an unwieldy object of study. My book project focuses its account of it through three organizing principles: the literary magazine Friendship of the Peoples, which not only made available some of the canonical texts of MSL to the all-Soviet reader but also has the benefit of being a concrete object with an excellent archive and connections to other MSL institutions; the Künnstlerroman (the artist's novel), one of the non-Russian Soviet writers favorite literary vehicle for thematizing the uneven and combined development of MSL; and finally, the concept of social class, both of multinational Soviet writers and of their novels’ characters. The book's main argument is developed through its chronological structure: from a vehicle for imagining the community of the multinational Soviet Union, into which it was rather repressively institutionalized in the 1930s, during perestroika, MSL and its authors became major forces in the Soviet collapse.

The project examines connections between the gendered visibility of Byzantine imperial women and changes in the urban fabric of the Byzantine centre Constantinople between the tenth and twelfth centuries. While imperial women appear more prominently in sources from this period than in earlier centuries, the causes of this shift remain unclear. The project aims to explain this development by examining how the construction and renewal of imperial-sponsored monumental complexes, alongside the expansion of ceremony, reshaped imperial women’s visibility in the city. The study focuses on imperial wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters of reigning or deceased emperors. Although these women spent most of their lives in Constantinople, while emperors were often absent on campaign, their roles in the city have received limited scholarly attention. To address this gap, the project employs a methodological framework based on a database structured around three variables: location, occasion, and audience. The research will culminate in a peer-reviewed article. It will offer new insights into how the spatial constitution of Constantinople shaped imperial women’s roles and visibility in the tenth to twelfth centuries, and offer a transferable framework for further research on women's visibility and power in urban settings in Byzantium, medieval Bulgaria and beyond.

The project conceptualizes memory mobilization as a mechanism linking interpretations of the past to contemporary democratic outcomes. It distinguishes between responsibility-based memory, which emphasizes accountability for past abuses and reinforces norms of pluralism, institutional constraints, and vigilance against concentrations of power, and glorification-based memory, centered on heroic or exclusionary narratives. Each type of memory articulates a normative understanding not only of the past but also of the present and future. When actively mobilized by states, political actors, or civic organizations and embedded in public discourse, these narratives may contribute to strengthening or weakening democratic resilience, rather than merely coexist with it. The project focuses on when and to what effect different types of memory politics (responsibility vs. glorification) and contesting discourses produce varied outcomes in democratic resilience, considering the level of institutionalization of authoritarian memory as a key condition. Using a comparative analysis of Estonia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Germany, the aim is to uncover these mechanisms. Understanding when and where memory infrastructure becomes vulnerable to illiberal capture or instrumentalization has direct policy relevance for ongoing European debates on resilience and the support of democratic norms.

This project examines generational awareness, character, and intergenerational relations within the Ottoman ruling elite from the reign of Sultan Süleyman (r. 1520–1566) to the death of Sultan Murad III (r. 1574–1595). Generational awareness refers, partly following Karl Mannheim, to the ethos, values, reflexes, and formative experiences shared by servants who entered imperial service within the same cohort and who perceived themselves as distinct from preceding or succeeding groups. Although scholarship on sixteenth-century Ottoman political configuration is extensive, the generational dimension of elite life has remained largely neglected. The study explores how generational identities shaped perceptions, political behavior, and patterns of cooperation and rivalry across age cohorts. It examines how individual experience, personal character, and cohort-specific memories informed alignment within the ruling elite and influenced decision-making in moments of crisis and stability. Using Ottoman and European sources such as chronicles, biographical compilations, telhis, mühimme accounts, Habsburg embassy reports, and Venetian correspondence, the project reconstructs how generational belonging shaped elite worldviews and political reflexes. Through selected case studies, it argues that generational awareness constituted a critical yet overlooked factor shaping intra-elite relations, imperial governance, and political culture in the early modern Ottoman world.

This project analyzes the relationship between social modernization and aesthetic modernism in interwar Bulgaria by considering music as a point of integration between structure and subjectivity. The upheavals of the 1920s-1930s in the newly-sovereign nation evince multiple paths to modernity, from communism to agrarianism to fascism. I argue that the sounds of this era, from urban popular music to modernist chamber music to workers’ songs, at once aesthetically refract these as-yet-undetermined paths of modernity and serve as the site for the construction of an urban public sphere. While Bulgarian folk and popular music have long been the subject of international scholarly inquiry, and Bulgarian art music has contributed to the European canon, this will be the first study to consider these threads together at a moment when such distinctions were fluid and still forming. “The Social Life of Music in Interwar Bulgaria” will draw upon archival sources in Sofia to connect the vibrant modernist milieu to the incipient civic life of the capital. In a largely agrarian, fairly egalitarian country with an ambiguous relationship both to global capital and international aesthetic trends, music illuminates the porous boundary between the modernist “coterie” and the “crowd” of modern mass culture.

This project investigates the practices of giving, such as bequests and donations, in Ottoman Istanbul, covering the period 1622-1826. The act of gift-giving within families has long been a subject of academic interest, connecting disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, and economics. At its core, intrafamily gift-giving represents not merely a material transfer of objects or resources, but complex social relationships deeply intertwined with systems of meaning, obligation, and identity. The project aims to answer the following questions: Did those who bequeathed and/or made donations in early modern Ottoman Istanbul seek to protect certain family members through the transfer of wealth? How did such transfers affect property and gender regimes? Did the practices of giving serve a function in clarifying intra-family hierarchies? This research project offers an original contribution to understanding Ottoman social transformation in the early modern period. It will redefine the role of family life in understanding this process, positioning the family as a dynamic unit linked to social structure and power relations, and fill a gap in the field by drawing on previously unused documents on gift-giving, property, and gender regimes within Ottoman society.

This project examines how contemporary women writers from Southeast Europe use the female body as a site of cultural memory and political critique in the context of post-socialist transformation and current culture wars. Focusing on the works of Bulgarian authors Rene Karabash and Yoanna Elmy, the study explores how literary representations of trauma, gendered violence, and bodily experience function as forms of “testimony in flesh.” In these texts, the body becomes an archive that records the intersections between personal suffering and broader political histories, including the legacy of socialism, democratic transition, and the resurgence of nationalist and patriarchal discourses in contemporary Bulgaria.The project places these Bulgarian narratives in dialogue with the work of Lea Ypi, whose reflections on post-socialist memory and ideological conflict offer a broader regional perspective on how individual life stories reveal the tensions of political transformation. Through comparative literary and cultural analysis, the research investigates how gendered experiences of violence and vulnerability expose the contradictions of post-socialist democracy and illuminate ongoing cultural conflicts over gender, identity, and historical memory.