Individual projects

Ever since the Upper Palaeolithic, communities have been making miniature figures, with a peak in figurine usage in the Balkan Neolithic - Chalcolithic (6200 – 3500 cal BC). While endlessly fascinating, these figurines remain enigmatic. The principal shift in approach has been from “What did these figurines mean?” to “What do these figurines do?” – viz., studies of performance and figurine agency. Many see figurines as vehicles for exploring people’s relationships with human bodies. Yet in the last two decades, the pendulum has swung towards agency and away from meaning, leading to a lack of integration of research results. This state of affairs offers an opportunity for new research in which context is central, performance is meaningful and human and object agencies are in dialogue. My main research question is “how were figurines embedded in domestic and mortuary performances through time and space in prehistoric Bulgaria?” I shall answer this question by studying reports on figurine assemblages and first-hand examination of some figurine collections in Bulgarian museums in order to discover the figurines’ depositional circumstances and performative roles. The output would be a chapter in an invited book in the Cambridge Elements “Archaeology and Gender” series on “Female figurines in European prehistory”.

This interdisciplinary project studies the geological exploration of the Balkan Peninsula, focusing on the descriptions and analyses of thermal water that were produced by traveling naturalists and scientists from the beginning of the sixteenth century until the end of the nineteenth. Placing the texts in their proper historical contexts and considering the authors’ agendas and the broader developments within the travel writing genre, the project examines how the exploration of the geology and thermal hydrology of the Balkans was situated in the overall study of the peninsula and what role it played in shaping the travelers’ perceptions of Balkan societies and cultures. I look into how Southeast Europe’s affinity for the healing and sacral properties of spring water informed Western travelers’ perceptions of the region as ‘other’ vis-à-vis the places they were coming from and how the study of the hydrothermal landscapes of the Balkans influenced the formation of a comprehensive image of the region. I use insights from cultural geography and anthropology to show how thermal water played an essential role in place-making in the Balkans and how its scientific exploration was ultimately linked to the study of human culture.

This research explores the dynamics of Bulgarian archaeology during the communist period and the Transition years (1944–2007), examining the profound influence of political ideologies on archaeological research, scientific interpretations and social implications. It is innovative for Bulgarian historiography, as the subject is challenging due to the difficulty of objectively assessing such a recent past. The proposed research is a multifaceted endeavour that requires a comprehensive approach. It aims to examine a wide range of issues, problems and key features, encompassing the historical background of Bulgaria during the communist period and beyond, political ideologies, state institutions and control, international relations, and the influence of political policies on the conservation and management of Bulgaria's archaeological heritage. The proposed research will be organised in several phases according to its main objectives. Using a variety of research methods, including archival studies and comparative analysis with other Eastern European countries, the study aims to stimulate scholarly discourse and inspire further research into Bulgaria's complex scientific past. Ultimately, the project will culminate in a monograph that will synthesise the findings to enrich our understanding of this fascinating historical period.

This research project seeks to comprehensively explore the overlooked and forgotten Turkish literature produced within Communist Bulgaria from 1944 to 1968. Despite comprising approximately one hundred poetry books, long stories, and novels during this period, these Turkish texts have been largely neglected by both Bulgarian and Turkish scholars, remaining mere entries in bibliographies. The primary aim of this research is to unravel the complex interplay between Turkishness, Muslimness, socialism, and peasantism as reflected in these (selected) Turkish literary works published in Bulgaria during the Cold War era. Specifically, this research focuses on texts released by the state-sponsored publishing house, Narodna Prosveta, from 1959 to 1968, as well as contributions to the monthly magazine Yeni Hayat (New Life) (1953-60) and its literary supplement, Çağdaş (Modern). By conducting literary and sociocultural analyses within the context of ideological upheavals during the Cold War, this project aims to illuminate the unique and uneven development of minority literature in Bulgaria. Additionally, it employs archival research to enhance understanding of the relationship between socialism, nationalism, the idea of the land, and Turkish literary culture within this specific historical framework. Furthermore, by conducting a comparative examination between Bulgaria and Turkey—neighboring countries aligned with opposing ideological blocs during the Cold War—the research enriches our comprehension of the diverse trajectories of Turkish literature under contrasting ideological regimes.

The Second World War played, and continues to play a major role in Ukrainian political, cultural, public, and scientific discourse. In the conditions of Russia's contemporary war against Ukraine, the memory of the Second World War, the previous destructive war on the territory of Ukraine, becomes even more relevant for the state, scientists, and the public. In this project, called 'Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Ukraine', Dr. Ihor Dvorkin plans to continue his research on the place of the Second World War in the contemporary Ukrainian discourse, after the Ukrainian independence in 1991. Since then, the coexistence of national and post-Soviet historical narratives in the political, scientific, and educational spheres was typical. However, after the Euromaidan and the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2014, and especially after the legislative changes of 2015, called "decommunization laws", the situation changed in favour of a national approach. These events had a significant impact on the humanitarian sphere in Ukraine, the politics of memory and historical politics. In his study, Dr. Dvorkin will assess the following phenomena:

• Soviet heritage and post-Soviet realities. The "Great Patriotic War" vs World War II (until 2014).
• Euromaidan (2014) and its impact on memory politics and historical politics. Legislative changes (2015). Changes in rhetoric, aesthetics and toponymy; the invention of new traditions.
• The impact of the full-scale Russian invasion (2022) on perceptions of World War II. Possible changes during and after the current war.
• Russian instrumentalization of the Second World War in the conditions of hybrid and full-scale wars and the Ukrainian response.
• "Memorial places" dedicated to the war in the Ukrainian city: Soviet and post-Soviet (memorials, monuments, commemorative practices).
• Memory of the war in the toponymy of the Ukrainian cities: dynamics of changes.

  

The majority of Ukrainians have grown up with the Soviet/post-Soviet tradition of World War II/“The Great Patriotic War” commemoration. For decades, this topic has been a central part of the politics of memory and family history in Ukraine. Everyone has knowledge about WWII, even those who might not be interested in history. It was this kind of knowledge that formed the general image of war as a phenomenon. But since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, people got a direct experience of the war in different roles: as a soldier, a refugee, a volunteer, or a bystander. How does the image of 'that war' overlap the image of 'this war'? How does the image of 'that war' change under the influence of the ongoing war? The main research question of this project is to examine how do the images of WWII and of the current war interact in Ukraine. How does the ongoing war affect the image, memory and commemoration of WWII? And, how do image, memory and commemoration of WWII influence the perception and expectations of commemoration of the ongoing war? The proposed research questions will especially focus on the local level in the city of Kryvyi Rih, and how 'this war' and 'that war' phenomena is reflected there.

In his project, Prof. Volodymyr Bureha plans to present life of the Orthodox Churches in Ukraine during the ongoing war  - with a focus on the time period from February 2022 to February 2023. After the Russian military invasion of Ukraine, profound transformations took place in the Ukrainian Orthodox Community. These processes will have an impact on post-war Ukraine in the future.For his research, Prof. Bureha will consider the main official documents of the Orthodox Churches in Ukraine, dedicated to the war. It is important to understand how the Churches viewed the war and how they carried out their ministry in the conditions of war. The study will tackle the fundamental difference between the position of the Orthodox Churches in Ukraine, and the position of the Russian Orthodox Church, which fully supported the aggression.Special attention will be paid to the deep transformations within the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which was part of the Moscow Patriarchate before the war started. During the first three months of the war, this Church severed all relations with Moscow and with Patriarch Kirill.Another aspect of this project is the evolution of relations between the Churches and Ukrainian state authorities. Special attention will be paid to the differences in the confessional policy of the central and regional authorities of Ukraine.

The protection of Ukraine’s Russian speakers was among the pretexts for the 2014 Russian invasion as well as the full-scale war unleashed by Russia in 2022. Russia’s claims of authority over the speakers of Russian have been based on simplistic equations of language and national identification. To show that these speculations bear little resemblance to how the things stand on the ground, Ukrainians have started the process of linguistic conversion. The years following the 2014 Russian invasion have seen a growing shift to Ukrainian from Russian whereby language choice is perceived as a social action with an existential effect. My project is an ethnographic study of Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine who are involved in linguistic conversion. I concentrate primarily on those individuals who are switching to Ukrainian from Russian within grassroots Ukrainian language initiatives. Besides the motivations behind their language choice, I explore the reasons prompting them to invest in the language learning, as well as the process of education. I aim to establish the role of the war in the mass transition to Ukrainian from Russian, define its impact on Ukrainian language pedagogy, and also cast light upon the transformation of identities in eastern Ukraine.

26 July 2023 will mark the 60th anniversary of the calamitous earthquake that struck the Socialist Republic of Macedonia’s capital city of Skopje in 1963, taking the lives of 1070 persons and destroying more than two-thirds of the urban fabric. Building upon the memory- and critical disaster studies, I recently published several papers in which I argued that the natural disaster shattered not only the material reality of Skopjans but also the symbolic worlds they inhabited, thus influencing much of their imaginaries of the city and its future urban development.The present proposal aims at discussing the Bulgarian political and societal responses to the 1963 Skopje earthquake. In the midst of the present-day bilateral quarrel over history and memory, I postulate that the mid-1960s episode of multilevel solidarity and support – such as, inter alia, the Bulgarian calls for aiding Skopje within the framework of the UN as well as the citizen-to-citizen help – challenges the prevailing understandings of shared history and memory in both the societies: as exclusivist, politically-driven notions. I will develop this research into a working paper after researching at the Sofia archives, conducting several interviews with experts and history witnesses, and discussing it with the colleagues at CAS.

This project examines the social history of tangerine trees imported from Japan to Cheju Island (South Korea) from the1960s to the 1980s. From the colonial era all the way to the April 3 Incident of 1948, hundreds of thousands of Cheju islanders went into exile and migrated to Japan in order to avoid political turmoil and economic hardships but were unable to return to their devastated homeland. These people sent money collectively to build Cheju infrastructures and shipped tens of thousands of tangerine trees for Cheju farmers to transform their farming lands from subsistence farming to growing cash crops. These tangerine trees have played a crucial role in rapidly increasing the farmers’ income and reshaping the ecology on Cheju, an exemplary tourist destination with a culture, history, and ecology distinct from the rest of Korea. By situating Cheju in the context of East Asian post-colonial / Cold War development, I develop a book project centered around three main points related to tangerine trees: 1) as gifts; 2) as commodities; and 3) as state projects. This project revisits the gift-commodity relationship and the governance of nature through the lens of tangerine trees, highlighting how Cheju has been controlled by, and has controlled, nature as a means of future-making.