Individual projects

Post-socialist Bulgaria was haunted by poltergeists, visited by aliens, and awash with ‘phenomena’ of various kinds. Why were these alternative forms of knowing the world proliferating in the first decades of ‘democracy’? This project combines the histories of late socialism with new research into the post-socialist period to explore the intersection of official and unofficial science and knowledge-making communities. Utilizing archival documents, analysis of literature, digital tools, and oral history, it will uncover the role of socialist science and narratives in the shaping of post-1989 narratives around Bulgarian ‘uniqueness’ but also esoteric expectations about spirits, energies, and aliens. It argues that the print and digital culture of the post-1989 period enabled amateur communities to claim scientific expertise in novel ways, often utilizing but obscuring the theories’ origins in earlier periods. Who could claim truth and how did they defend it? More so, why was post-socialist Bulgaria receptive to such ideas and why do publics continue to flock to and fund such communities? Building on existing literature about both the lost utopias of socialism and the ways post-crisis societies deal with meaning and disenchantment (from political narratives), this project bridges the 1989 divide in political and cultural language in novel ways.

When we ask ourselves what are the objects of our visual perception, the most intuitive answer that comes to mind is that we perceive the things that constitute our reality or external world, e.g. buildings, trees, tables, etc. In philosophy of perception, this account came to be known as common sense realism, naïve realism or direct realism. Regardless of its intuitiveness, however, direct realism nowadays has close to none supporters to endorse it.

Objectives – identification of manifestations and new trends in the use of the narrative of the Great Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) in modern Belarusian memory politics, description of forms, methods of its implementation and disclosure of antagonistic essence.The following questions will be investigated: 1. Appeal to the GDL in memorial laws, political documents, politicians' speeches. 2. Non-governmental initiatives to promote the narrative of the GDL. 3. Main stages, directions and forms of memory politics implementation. 4. Conflictogenic “zones of memory” about the GDL and antagonism of memory politics. 5. The significance of the actualization of the narrative of the GDL for the Belarusian societyThe novelty – creation of the first special study on the border of history, philosophy, geopolitics, sociology. Belarusian factology will be placed in the context of modern theory of memory politics.Research sources: scientific literature, media materials.

The project explores the predicament of Bulgarian cultural and artistic intelligentsia in the unexplored post-socialist period when, for the first time in their two-century history, intellectuals were becoming uniquely insignificant figures. The project is envisioned as a social–historical and cultural analysis of how Bulgarian intellectuals, artists, writers, poets, and filmmakers experienced first the liberal-intellectual and then the social revolution engendered by the transition from state socialism to neol-iberal capitalism. It explores the paradox that while East European intellectuals and dissidents were instrumental in the demise of communism, it was ironically under neo-liberal democracy that they were relegated to a life of cultural and social irrelevance. Methodologically, the project will weave an economic analysis of the impact of the new market economy on intellectual and artistic production together with a cultural analysis of intellectual and artistic reactions to the cultural and political transformations of the 1990s and 2000s. Examining intellectuals’ attitudes towards such issues as nationalism, pro-EU or pro-US sentiment, political activism, and post-communist nostalgia, this project seeks to understand how the marginalization of the intelligentsia has affected not only post-1989 cultural and intellectual life, but also social and political mobilization.

Nothing quite captures the historical imagination like warfare. And very few stories of conquest can match the Ottoman military expansion from Gallipoli to Vienna and its consolidation of power over the Balkan peninsula. This project proposal aims to re-evaluate the accounts on four prominent battles through an integrated battlefield archaeology approach. The selected case studies include the battle of Ihtiman (c. AD1355), the battle of Maritsa (AD1371), the battle of Nikopol (AD1396), and the battle of Varna (AD1444). In the centre of the approach offered here is the understanding that battle sites are not merely the setting for interpersonal violence rather than culturally and socially constructed landscapes of conflict. Thus, the material signature of organized warfare holds a particular value for long-term commemoration and cultural heritage. Finally, the comparative and interdisciplinary analysis on these foci of the Ottoman conquest aims to integrate them in the ongoing European-wide reappraisal of battlefields.

The research project deals with civilizational analysis in historical sociology and new perspectives on civilizational politics in the field of international relations. Contemporary civilizational analysis as a sociological paradigm devotes considerable attention to civilizational legacies in today’s world. At the same time the research programme of civilizational politics in IR regards civilizations as discursive constructs and focuses on the ways in which political imaginaries become institutionalized. Apparently, these perspectives can be seen as complementary. However, current discussions of Russian ‘civilizationism’ are characterized by selective appropriation of insights from new approaches in IR and general neglect of the findings of historical sociology. The project evaluates recent research on civilizational aspects of Russian politics and stresses the need to reconsider this issue taking into account the contributions of sociological civilizational analysis. The study of social and political imaginaries is a growing interdisciplinary field. It can be argued that the case of post-Soviet Russia is particularly relevant for the discussion of civilizational imaginaries. In particular, the project will focus on the relationship between the concepts of ‘civilization’ and ‘empire’ in construction of Russia’s identity. The project will employ the methodology of comparative-historical analysis.

The project aims to shed light on the complex dynamics of heritage production and consumption in Southeastern Europe, with a particular focus on nowadays Bulgaria. It critically examines the concept of the ‘crossroad of civilisations’ as a representation of a historical amalgamation of various cultures and religions, and argues that this idea often neglects or obscures specific layers of cultural heritage. The project employs Critical Heritage Studies to challenge power structures, dominant narratives and cultural conventions surrounding heritage-making. Through investigating different heritage fragments in Bulgaria – both nationally celebrated and contested ones – the research explores interrelations, dependencies, and hierarchies between them. The processes of heritagization are examined in relation to regional and European dynamics that reinforce or question the notions of Europe’s core and periphery. The study focuses on three recent Bulgarian exhibitions at the Paris Louvre Museum, with an aim to investigate and analyse their respective heritage discourses. The hypothesis suggests that a collective examination of these cases can reveal interdependent relationships and hierarchical structures, which have the potential to deepen our understanding of current European heritage politics. Furthermore, this project intends to broaden conventional approaches towards interpreting heritage within the region while making valuable contributions towards advancing the discipline of heritage studies as a whole.

During the Ming and Qing Dynasties of Imperial China, Muslim Chinese scholars translated and transmitted Islamic thought from Persian-Arabian texts to Chinese readership through the intellectual framework and vocabularies of Confucian Chinese tradition. This intellectual thought in Islamic literature was called Han Kitab (Sino-Islamic texts) and those thinkers are known as Confucian Muslims (Hurui). Through this new perspective of Islamic-Confucianism, I propose to carry out a pioneering research project to investigate how leading Confucian Muslims (Hurui) responded, interpreted, and criticized Christian doctrines in the writings of Han Kitab. By selectively translating and analysing Sino-Islamic texts in dialogue with Christianity, this research project attempts to retrieve Muslim Chinese scholars’ responses towards Christian missionaries and the Christian doctrines. Through translating and analysing Han-Kitab, this research project aims at reconstructing the formative encounters and characteristics of Confucian Muslim-Christian relations in the context of Sino-Islamic intellectual tradition.

The research in object-based teaching and learning at US colleges and universities, as well as Dr. Milkova's pedagogic practice at leading institutions such as Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Oberlin College, has been at the forefront of innovating and updating 21st-century liberal arts education in the US. The project she proposes encompasses research towards a book-length manuscript that introduces to academics and museum professionals in Bulgaria the pedagogic value and benefits of teaching with collections across academic disciplines. Building upon her previous publications in English, drawing on recent scholarship in museum and higher education, and based on new research and data she obtains as a CAS fellow, Liliana will put forward (in Bulgarian) strategies applicable to different types of collections and museums in the country. The CAS fellowship will enable her to research and write the final book chapter that translates and adapts practices well-established abroad for Bulgaria’s specific context. To do this, she will investigate existing approaches to museum education through first-hand observations and interviews, workshops for faculty, students, and museum specialists that she will lead, and through a review of the relevant scholarly literature produced in Bulgaria in the last two decades.

Notwithstanding the fact that the ideological framework of Balkan nationalism as well as it’s implications in the redrawing of the political boundaries in the Balkans have been intensively studied, the way nations perceived events which led to ideological crisis and/or had disastrous consequences for their expansionist policies undermining their Great Ideas still remains overlooked. By the same token, equivalently unexplored is the issue of a comparative approach with respect to analyzing how nations that shared common paths in their national-building process perceived their national catastrophes. In this respect, this project will attempt to shed light on the vacillations of Greek and Bulgarian national narratives in periods of national disaster, that is the second Bulgarian national disaster of 1919 and the Greek national disaster of 1922, also known as the Asia Minor Catastrophe. The research, which is mostly based upon analysis of the Bulgarian and Greek press, focuses on two main aspects; the intranational and the comparative approach. The intranational approach will attempt to answer the following questions: a) how did public opinion in Greece and Bulgaria cope with events that nullified transborder nationalism leading to national catastrophes? b) Is a national catastrophe capable of putting an end to national expansionism and appeasing national sentiments? c) How do the protagonists of the catastrophic events defend themselves and narrate their version of the story? d) Is the concept of the hostile National Other, which usually refers to nations, internalized and attributed to those who were responsible for the national catastrophe? Based on the results of this intranational research the comparative approach will detect convergences and divergences in the way Greeks and Bulgarians perceived their national catastrophes.