Individual projects

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.

The project explores how various local communities in medieval Byzantium engaged with hope through Byzantine saints’ cults, which served as a performative space of negotiating life crises, experiences of disability and illness. It examines miracle accounts as both reflections of and catalysts for the underlying discourses of hope in these communities. By illuminating the intersection between hope as an emotional practice and lived religion, via a novel methodology approaching the miraculous healings as a constantly evolving repertoire of collaborative practices between members of social-material actor networks, the project will provide fresh insights into how the Byzantines navigated their life crises, contributing, at the same time, to the broader conversation between the history of emotions, experiences, and social history.

While there is no lack of documentary and biographical literature treating the socialist period in Bulgaria, the perception of insufficiency remains, both among the specialized and the general audience. My aim is to employ creative nonfiction to tell the stories of a category of people who have rarely discussed their life experience, namely those members of the Communist Party who exhibited both ideological conviction and pragmatic life attitude but at the same time their interactions with the Zhivkov regime were far from peaceful. Their stories remain largely untold, a situation which does not entail a fuller understanding of the socialist period.

This project analyses the apocalypse phenomena along with three categories: self, time, and emotion. These three categories shape an interpretational space for our thoughts about the apocalypse in general, the COVID-19 pandemic in particular, and apocalyptic experiences in the war. As the simplest form of a micro-apocalypse, one takes a personal experience at the border of the subjective present time. An experience flow goes to its limit, the world ceases to exist, and all that remains is the self, which is interpreted as the central entity of personality. This experience is a very short interruption in the flow of consciousness as a brief break of personal being in the world (Polunin, 2011). This micro-break has a specific timing and emotional accompaniment. The discrepancies in the self-experience given directly at the border of the subjective present time and outside the border are of particular interest. Comparing them, we examine how the cognitive system overcomes the periodically appearing micro-apocalypse, taking this mechanism as natural. Then we move from the micro-apocalypse to the social level. At the social level, we analyse the apocalyptic thinking regarding Covid-19 and the war. From person to society, we interpret the social self as a stable group identity. Thus, the model will develop further from the micro-level to the larger social dimension. The resulting theoretical model should interpret apocalypses of different natures - personal, social, economic, and military. This approach should contribute not only to the theoretical modelling of the apocalypse but also to improved communication in society at large.

This project aims to determine the specifics of the images of Ukraine constructed by church historians of the Russian Empire during the "long" 19th century. The transformation of Russian church narratives about Ukrainian history will be examined from the broad perspective of the history of colonialism, nationalism studies, and new imperial history. Dr. Pavlo Yeremieiev will try to discover how the characteristics of the Ukrainian lands in church historiography were influenced by the historians' personal theological, historiosophical, and socio-political views, changes in methodological approaches to studying history, and general cultural trends of the era. Can we characterise the Russian Orthodox Church as a maiden of the state (in terms of Richard Pipes) in constructing the images of the Ukrainian past?  What was the role of the scenarios of power (in terms of Richard Wartman) and the invention of tradition (in terms of Eric Hobsbaum) in constructing the images of Ukrainian lands by Russian church historians? How did the Russian, Ukrainian and Polish national movements influence the church's historical narratives about Ukrainian lands? In what way did the church historians actualise Biblical images and medieval concepts (the Second Jerusalem and so on) to characterise Ukrainian religious history?

The project presents an interdisciplinary approach to the interrelationship between media, language, and society in the context of conflicts and wars. It integrates frameworks from sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics, describes the phenomenon of media language and compares it in different countries. On the example of the warfare between Ukraine and Russia (Russian military aggression), the study will show the impact of the conflict on the media language, type of media and society, as well as make a comparative analysis of the methods and techniques used by media actors to communicate with people. In this context, Dr Yuliya Krylova-Grek pays attention to the different aspects of language in the period of war and conflicts: language as a weapon (“weaponized language”), language as a tool of resistance, and counteraction to psychological operations (PSYOPs). The interdisciplinary approach allows the researcher to explore what methods and tools media actors use to influence public opinion and how the choice of language is determined by social and political context, depending on the country and region. The project is based on a comparative study of how media operate during conflicts and crises in different countries and regions (Ukraine, Russia, Central and Eastern European countries).

The project is focused on studying the peculiarities of an important Ukrainian region through the prism of quality of life. "Quality of life" is used as a collective interdisciplinary category (at the intersection of Sociology, History, Medicine, Economics, and Psychology), which allows us to look at the human environment, the influence of natural conditions and climate, changes in nutrition and their consequences, the (un)successful fight against diseases and medicalization, changing social conditions and social standards. These are difficult areas to reflect on, especially if the historian wants to find long-lasting, important changes and tectonic shifts. It is uneasy to compare the quality of life in time or space because the population has different standards and expectations. In his research, Dr Igor Serdiuk has to apply universal comparative indicators, such as mortality parameters, food security, earnings ratio and prices of basic necessities. At the same time, it is essential how people of that time, especially representatives of the "silent majority", imagined the quality of their life. To investigate this, I apply micro-historical and historical-anthropological approaches to working with sources that allow hidden "voices" to be heard. The result of the project will be several scientific publications, an optional discipline for master's students-historians, updating the existing educational courses "Everyday life history" and "Methodology of history", which I teach to students-historians.

The project examines how East European Jews, a population bedeviled by grinding poverty and economic and residential restrictions, viewed another maligned population – Black Africans and African Americans – with whom they had no contact. Although most of them would not see a Black person throughout their lives, or only upon their arrival in America, East European Jews already acquired some level of information, however skewed, which served as a basis for imagining Black people as savage and primitive. This study critically revises the existing literature and provides an invaluable insight into the process of combining traditional and modern elements in the acquisition of knowledge. The project's findings are significant to the larger context of immigration history. They demonstrate how would-be immigrants have had preconceived imagery of Blacks prior to setting foot in America (same notions are true for those who stayed in the Old Country). Parallel cases of imagining people without meeting them can be shown with other ethnic groups who also hailed from areas that had no Black population, whether in Europe or Asia. Those themes are especially relevant to studying the dynamics of racism, as they expand our understanding of the genealogy of knowledge. In that respect, this study is also important to fields such as translation studies and history of science, as it examines how literature, scientific texts, and travel accounts were transformed when disseminated in a different culture.

This project is a continuation of Ivo Danchev's previous work, "Behind the Masks," where he explored the participation of different ethnic and social groups in Bulgaria's ancient masked traditions, with a particular emphasis on the Roma minority. He is committed to creating a visually compelling and socially relevant narrative that not only captures the essence of the Kukeri but also contributes to the ongoing dialogue around cultural heritage and inclusivity.