Individual projects

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.

My project, titled “Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva’s Personal Turn, 1975-1983,” examines a moment in the history of French thought when the certainties of Marxism and Structuralism were collapsing. In the last half-decade of the 1970s and first years of the 1980s, Barthes and Kristeva, leading intellectuals on the French Left, began to break from this political formation towards a new kind of apparently a-political thinking. Following a trip together to Mao’s China, which Barthes dismissed as a failure and Kristeva initially celebrated as a utopian experiment (before rejecting it in favor of a new appreciation for capitalist democracy, inspired by the United States, in the late 70s), each turned to writing about intimate emotional processes rather than political struggle. Barthes gave a series of lectures on ‘the lover’s discourse,’ culminating in a book on the subject; Kristeva prepared a book on ‘abjection,’ Powers of Horror, followed by her own analysis of love. And yet, I argue, their mutual turns to the personal were not only shaped by their different political reactions to Communist China, but represented a common project of rethinking the foundations of Western politics from a post-utopian vantage, founded on a careful analysis of psychic life.

The project concerns the cognitive value of literature. Is literature an effective cognitive medium? What sort of knowledge literature provides? How is this knowledge justified? These themes have constituted the focus of my recent research, which has already resulted in publications in significant journals. During my fellowship period, I will compose two articles on these themes. The first one defends the idea that literary works can give knowledge of what it is like to have a certain kind of experience, usually termed “experiential knowledge” in aesthetics. The second paper deals with the issue of justification. How can the reader draw valid conceptions and perspectives on what it is like to have a certain kind of experience from literary works? Drawing on esteemed research on epistemic trust, authority, responsibility, and virtuosity, I argue that many literary works meet the same conditions that social epistemologists have thought to lie behind valid epistemic trust. Together with my previous publications, these articles form the basis of a monograph the manuscript of which I plan to finish by the end of 2024. The results of the project are important for understanding the threats related to the global decrease of literary reading witnessed in recent decades.

The project is about writing a book on the Russo-Ottoman War of 1828-1829, focusing on its long-term impact on the Balkans and the Caucasus. In the scholarly literature the war has been studied from narrow and nationalistic agendas, without using the Ottoman archives and with little use of the archives of Georgia and Armenia. The proposed research and ensuing monograph will develop a synthetic and comprehensive narrative and a more objectively balanced view of the war, without being drowned in technical details. Research questions: What was the impact of the 1828-29 Russo-Ottoman War on the European balance of power, the Eastern Question, the Balkans and the Caucasus? Why were Russian military authorities reluctant to use Balkan irregulars in this war? Were the Bulgar volunteers similar to the Greek klephti? Why was Russia more successful than the Ottomans in gaining the neutrality of Kurdish tribes along the Caucasian borderlands? Why did Russia set up an Armenian province out of the khanates of Erivan and Nakhichevan, ceded by Qajar Iran in 1828? Apart from the Greek independence and autonomy of the Danubian principalities, what was the legacy of the war?

Motivated by my previous and upcoming work situated at the junction of the Classics and the Medical Humanities, and inspired by recent events relating to the Covid-19 pandemic, the aim of this project is to offer a charitable reading of patient anxieties in illness narratives dating to the High Roman Empire, a pivotal period in political and medical history (ca. 1st-2nd c. CE).As a branch of ‘technical’ learning, medicine was held in high regard by the leading class in this period. Confronted with the sheer reality of illness, medical uncertainty, and the prominence of the medical art in the public sphere, numerous eminent members of learned society, including philosophers, sophists, politicians, even emperors, wrote extensively about medicine and health related topics, to the extent that some scholar contemptuously speak of an ‘Age of Hypochondria’.Within this fascinating, and still under-explored field, my interest while at CAS Sofia is in the ways in which Stoic philosophers express and deal with health related anxieties. What strategies do they propose to manage such fears? And how effective is their philosophy really when push comes to shove? How did the ancient Stoics square their high-minded philosophy with the physical reality of bodily illness and pain, which they profess to be ‘indifferents’ (indifferentia/adiaphora)?Seneca is a good case in point considering his notoriously weak physique (the man suffered from asthma, suspirium, among other such respiratory afflictions). How does this leading Stoic make sense of his bad health? How does he try to rationalise his fear and expectation of death by boldly – even cheerfully – looking it in the eye? What strategies does he claim are helpful (for himself and for his reader) to philosophically cope with existential crises? And how typical (or not) is his case? In other words, what role do such anxieties play in Stoic illness narratives more generally? What concepts and imagery are being used to capture it? And does the ‘Stoic patient’ (if indeed this is a valid category) always practice what he/his philosophy preaches in terms of mental tranquillity and medical self-management (think, e.g., of the correspondence between the emperor Marcus Aurelius, author of the Meditations, and his teacher Fronto, a prominent Roman sophist, where they complain about all kinds of localised pain)?In addressing questions like these, this project combines perspectives from the history of emotions and intellectual history (viz. ancient philosophy and medicine), with the aim of making a meaningful contribution to our understanding of the affective experience, as well as the cognitive construction, of fear/anxiety as an embodied phenomenon in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, and what relevance these ancient patient voices may still have for us today.

I identified and deciphered unpublished cuneiform tablet from the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. Surprisingly, the Middle Babylonian text (ca. 1500-1200 BCE) turned out to be a forerunner to a medical treatise on Bronchial complaints from the Nineveh Medical Encyclopaedia. The latter is the foremost collection of therapeutic writings from the Ashurbanipal Royal Library (7th century BCE), and the most important compendium of medical literature before Hippocrates. Moreover, cuneiform therapies against coughing phlegm as recorded on the Baghdad tablet bear unmistakable similarities to practices from the Hippocratic Corpus (post 4th century BCE). These sources offer a unique opportunity for medical historians, since we can now clearly see that therapies recorded in the Graeco-Roman world were in use in the Ancient Near East, even during the 2nd Millennium BCE.The project aims to scrutinize the Baghdad tablet in context. The Mesopotamian evidence will be compared and juxtaposed with similar practices from the Graeco-Roman world, but also beyond, since we are aware from other case studies that common therapies circulated throughout the ancient world. Furthermore, these similarities will be interdisciplinary discussed with real doctors, who will provide more medical context. The results will be published in a peer-reviewed paper.