Individual projects

This project explores the materiality of language as an important perspective within the humanities and as a central challenge for contemporary literary studies. It seeks to introduce the Central and Eastern European perspective into the debate: it starts from the premise that the encounter between the scientific work of the Prague Linguistic Circle and interwar avant-garde literature represents an underexplored resource for rethinking this issue. In that historical moment, the materiality of language emerges at the intersection of science and literature, sensory perceptibility and social, political, and institutional embeddedness. By closely analyzing period texts across different genres, the project reconstructs this perspective as a coherent framework and positions it within ongoing international discussions. The outcome will be a renewed understanding of the materiality of language that can be applied to the study of current transformations in linguistic and literary practices.

The project “The Thracians in Ptolemaic Egypt” investigates the Thracian diaspora during the Hellenistic period, focusing on its mechanisms, extent and socio-cultural impact. Thracians, originally from the northern Balkans, migrated to Egypt following the conquests of Alexander the Great and the establishment of the Ptolemaic kingdom. They were involved in military service, administrative roles, and local economic life, leaving traces in different written sources as papyri, steles and ostraca. Building on the pioneering work of V. Velkov and A. Fol (1977) and incorporating recent discoveries and methodological advances, this project reassesses the social status, identity, and contributions of Thracians in Ptolemaic Egypt. Particular attention will be given to Thracian onomastics, domestic traditions, and participation in cultural and civic activities. By combining papyrological, epigraphic, and historical evidence, the study aims to provide a nuanced understanding of migration, integration, and cross-cultural interaction in the Hellenistic Mediterranean. The project will shed light on the socio-economic and cultural relations between Thrace and Egypt, revealing the impact of Thracian communities on the Alexandrian cultural milieu and offering new perspectives on ancient mobility and diaspora networks.

This Habilitation project reinterprets the 1859 union of Moldavia and Wallachia as a contested process of state formation with deeply unequal regional consequences. While Romanian national historiography has largely celebrated this “Small Union” as an inevitable step toward the modern nation-state, the project shifts attention to Moldavia as a political and cultural space in its own right. For Moldavia, union entailed the loss of statehood, the downgrading of Iași from capital to provincial city, and long-term political, economic, and symbolic marginalization. The project closes a major research gap by offering the first systematic study of the anti-unionist and regionalist responses to the 1859 unification. Conceptually, it links state-building to processes of peripheralization and understands Moldavian regionalism as a flexible repertoire of political, cultural, and social practices rather than as a merely anti-national phenomenon. It thus highlights the ‚losers’ of unification and their political agency. At the same time, the project embeds Romanian state formation in the wider European age of competing unifications. Drawing on regional archives, Romanian and foreign press, memoirs, and diplomatic reports, it reconstructs how union was implemented, contested, and reinterpreted between 1859 and 1918.

In the period of planned economy and mass industrialization, theatre, instrumentalized by military language and agricultural metaphors, was conceptualized as a “factory” of socialist realist cultural productions. Starting with 1949, industrial planning became the model for planning cultural life in state socialist Romania. Not only that the plots of socialist realist dramas were prescribed and repertoires were centralized, but a number of shows and number of viewers had to be set – production plans, just like in the case of industry, were preferably exceeded by the end of the year. In this dystopian “factory”, theatrical productions were reduced merely to numbers and statistics, theatres participated in socialist labor competitions, and the process of artistic creation was hidden under the language of propaganda. The project proposes to uncover a lesser researched period of theatre history in Romania focusing on the different meanings of artistic creation, production and work from the period of transition after WWII, followed by the years of Sovietization, and up until the first steps made towards de-Stalinization. Cross-reading and confronting a variety of archival sources, this research aims to outline the complex relationship between state politics and institutional practices of theatrical life caught between planned economy and artistic creation.

The project deals with proposals and ideas about European unification presented by Eastern European emigrant politicians during the Cold War. Their ultimate plan was to restore liberal democracy in their home countries, and unification was a parallel goal to that. However, the concept and content of the idea of Europe was not shared by all emigration, but it divided the political elite. Furthermore, their American sponsors and Western European colleagues gradually abandoned the Eastern partners and started to create contacts to the civil society of the Soviet bloc. The research is based on extensive archival material of Assembly of Captive European Nations (a collective organization for emigrants from nine countries), Free Europe Committee (a clandestine American organization to provide them official funding), and European organizations for unification, such as European Movement and Council of Europe. I have already collected the relevant material at the Immigration History Research Center in Minneapolis, Hoover Institute at Stanford and Historical Archives of European Union in Florence. During the fellowship, the goal is to complete a scholarly monograph on this topic. Additionally, I’ll write an article on the evolution of the concept of Europe within Anti-bolshevik Bloc of Nations, a right-wing emigrant collective.

This project investigates Soviet counterintelligence operations in the Dnipropetrovsk region during the Khrushchev Thaw (mid-1950s to early 1960s), focusing on the KGB’s role in securing classified defense-industrial information, exerting control over urban life, and recruiting locals for intelligence operations. Due to its status as a pivotal hub for missile and rocket production, Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro) was designated a “closed city” in 1959. The research examines how the KGB managed industrial espionage by both monitoring foreign visitors and mobilizing local professionals – engineers and scientists – as informants. Additionally, the study explores how Soviet authorities implemented strict security protocols, controlled information flows, and influenced the everyday lives of residents through surveillance, censorship, and ideological enforcement. Through the analysis of newly accessible archival materials and previously overlooked historiographical sources, this study reveals the intricate mechanisms of secrecy enforcement and internal surveillance. Grounded in theories of state surveillance and social control (Foucault, Scott, Popper), this research highlights the complex interplay between technological progress, state control, and the lived realities of citizens. Ultimately, this research contributes to Cold War studies by shifting the focus from external espionage to domestic counterintelligence, offering fresh insights into Soviet industrial security and the impact of strict surveillance on local society.

The waterways that flow through large cities are living sources of the history, of urban planning, wastewater or drinking water management policies, but they also reflect local mind-sets and practices over time. It is a social and cultural fabric around rivers, canals, and water sources. Urban water constitute as much a local place for life as it is a resource with broader ecological and geopolitical stakes. During the residency in Sofia, I aim to explore this field by walking along the banks of two rivers in the form of strolls with local artists, architects, curators, and scientists. Talking Streams is a curatorial research project that seeks to create a collective mental map of waterways and gather various voices into a sound archive, emphasizing the life that develops within and around the streams.

How long can elites maintain a high social status? How quickly can ordinary people move up the social ladder? Gary Becker and Nigel Tomes (1986) show that the income advantageous or disadvantageous of ancestors has disappeared in three generations. Nevertheless, Gregory Clark and colleagues (Clark, 2014; 2015), using surname records and historical data, find that elites retain a high social status for centuries with a probability close to one. Using Gregory Clark’s innovative approach, my study attempts to answer these and other related questions by analyzing the mobility of Ukrainian lineages during the 19th-21st centuries on the territory of modern Ukraine, Russia, the former USSR and the Russian Empire. Preliminary calculations show that holders of Ukrainian noble surnames were two times overrepresented in the State Duma of the Russian Empire. Were they able to maintain their high social status during two world wars, the October Revolution, and the formation and collapse of the USSR? Did the Communist Party and national independence facilitate the social advancement of individuals having common Ukrainian lineages? The answer to these questions will not only complement existing research but also reassess the history and logic of those turbulent events that we are witnessing today.