Individual projects

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.

Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) was a Muslim theologian and jurist, one of the most influential representatives of the Hanbalite theological and legal school in Sunni Islam. As such, his work has been extensively studied in the context of Islamic theology and the Islamic religious law Sharī a. This project aims to examine Ibn Taymiyya’s work from a different andʽ previously unexplored perspective: that of translation studies. To this end, it will identify the texts from his works in which the main elements of his understanding of translation are presented. Critical analysis of the texts will reveal Ibn Taymiyya’s place in the history of Arabic translation discourse and facilitate the presentation of his understanding of translation. He perceives it both as a historical process of interlinguistic transfer and as an analytical category that enables the exploration of divergences within the Islamic culture and identifies differences between Islam and other epistemological and religious traditions.

The project aims at analyzing and synthesizing the evidence for critique of religion and rulers from Ancient Mesopotamia cuneiform sources (ca. 2600-500 BC), which has often been neglected in Ancient Near Eastern Studies themselves and as a consequence also in neighboring fields. The Enlightenment, is an intellectual movement of utmost importance for the development of the history of the modern world. Enlightenment fostered a democratic development as well as the liberation of sciences and humanities from the control of the church and other authorities. Therefore, historians and philosophers intensively studied the European Enlightenment and its forerunners. For our understanding of intellectual history and Enlightenment phenomena the Mesopotamian evidence is of utmost importance, as it precedes the Greek developments and provides an intellectual context for them. In a series of articles, I have demonstrated that such phenomena, as the critique of the king or even critique of the gods, exist in cuneiform sources and during my stay at CAS I will refine and extend these findings and publish them in the form of a short monograph.

Based on a detailed historical analysis of the emergence of the contemporary concept of equality in international human rights law the project paints a comprehensive picture of the structural deficiencies of this concept and proposes an alternative. The research on equality is a burgeoning field. However, as highlighted by many scholars, the processes of globalisation require a re-articulation of the traditional vision of equality and in particular alternatives to both the welfare state and neo-liberal thinking. I argue that to achieve this re-articulation a deeper historical understanding of the structural elements and presuppositions underlying the current equality thinking in international human rights law is required. Systemic and systematic analysis of this deficiencies can only emerge from a careful historical analysis of institutionalisation of equality in the League of Nations and the United Nations. Insights gained from this historical examination are then complemented by philosophical and broader theoretical reflections on difference and identity by Deleuze, Derrida, Nishida, and queer theory to propose a novel approach to equality. This approach is expected to be more adapted to the conditions of globalisation. Examples from arts to be created in cooperation between the scholar and the artists are used as illustrations.

The project seeks to explore the history of mercenary employment in Muscovy during the Smolensk War with Poland-Lithuania from 1632 to 1634 within a broader historical context. This period represents the most extensively documented case in Muscovite history where large military units, comprised entirely of foreigners (primarily Germans, Englishmen, and Scotsmen), were recruited abroad under fixed mercenary contracts. Through this case study, I investigate the dynamics of interaction with foreign private military entrepreneurs in Muscovy and present this evidence within the framework of state-building processes and mercenary service in Early Modern Europe. While recent research has highlighted the significance of private military actors in Central and Western Europe from the 15th to the 18th centuries, the narrative surrounding Russian military history during this period has predominantly remained state-centered. My objective is to challenge this narrative by applying methodological frameworks developed for studies on European military entrepreneurship to 17th-century Muscovy. The research is primarily based on unpublished sources from Russian, British, Swedish, and German archives, which I have already collected. During my time in Sofia, I intend to finalize my prosopography database on mercenary officers in Muscovite service and complete the draft of the monograph on this subject.

The purpose of this comparative research is to analyze similarities of modernist literatures of two port cities – Odesa and Tel Aviv, both in terms of direct influence and in broader typological terms. By pointing to these cities’ seaport aspect, the project foregrounds the common denominator of this research – the hybrid nature of port cities, evidenced in their literary output, which transgresses assumed ethno-linguistic boundaries. While the hybrid characteristics of port cities are well researched in general and in particular with regard to their Levantine and Black Sea examples, scholars have confined their research predominantly to urban and sociocultural intra-contextual analysis, whereas Dr. Waysband's project combines intra- and inter-textual analysis of their literature, drawing upon interdisciplinary Levantine studies with an emphasis on the concept of hybridity. The project foregrounds a reciprocal process of cultural transmission between Mediterranean/Levantine and Black Sea cultural areas, (1) highlighting the Ukrainian constituent of Hebrew modernist poetry and (2) analyzing thematic and linguistic forms of expression of the Levantine self-perception of Odesa’s modernist writers. By pointing to the interconnectedness of these processes, the project aims at cross-fertilization of  Mediterranean/Levantine, Black Sea, and Ukrainian cultural studies.

This comparative study, the first of its kind, will answer several questions: how do disputes over history and identity in international politics unfold and what actions are taken by states? Can historians work simultaneously as servants to nation-states and as independent trans-national professionals? What are the roles of history professionals in domestic politics and identity formation in the “age of memory”? Having surveyed twenty-plus joint historians’ commissions created in Europe and Asia since the 1990s, I plan to spend three months at CAS in Sofia in 2025 to fill the only remaining gap: an in-depth examination of N. Macedonia’s JHCs with Bulgaria and Greece. By including these two little-studied JHCs, my book will be truly comprehensive, and will be a significant and original contribution to the growing literature on the entanglement of history and identity in international politics.

This project delves into the understudied realm of late Soviet photography, particularly focusing on the phenomenon of fotografika, a term encompassing various manipulative techniques employed by amateur photographers to transform their images into the likeness of graphic pieces. Despite its prevalence, it remains largely unexplored in scholarly discourse, presenting an opportunity to unravel its significance within the Eastern Bloc and on an international scale. Drawing upon a diverse range of sources, including periodicals and exhibition catalogues, the project aims to analyse the reception of fotografika in Soviet critical literature, shedding light on its dual existence within both official and non-official spheres. By examining the material gathered from the Museum of the Kharkiv School of Photography and similar collections, supplemented by materials from other ex-socialist countries and FIAP salons, the project seeks to construct a comprehensive understanding of fotografika's role in amateur photo club movement of the 1960s-1980s.