Individual projects

Research Project Description

The purpose of the proposed research is to explore the role of the state in conjunction with models of collective action as practiced through the organisation of cooperative movements in the inter-war period. Representing a form of corporate organisation at the intersection between the economy, society and politics, cooperatives provide for an ideal laboratory to ‘revisit' the notion of the state as the institutionalisation of a complex and dynamic power nexus. The project thus wishes in the first place to contribute to modernisation debates on Southeast and Central Europe by historicising models and practices of social organisation and economic activity. In the second, it aspires to readdress a European phenomenon and evaluate the particularity or universality of its adaptation in the specific contexts of Southeast and Central Europe from a comparative perspective. Finally, due to post-1989 developments, scholarly attention has focused overwhelmingly on the Communist period, ignoring in a certain way its prehistory. The current work wishes to bridge this historical gap by re-examining the configuration of state and society relations in the dramatic and ideologically loaded inter-war period.

The research is based on a comparative analytical framework, taking the case of inter-war Bulgaria as its pilot study with the intention to include the case of the first Czechoslovak Republic as a contrasting case study. Methodologically, it attempts to build a link between social, cultural and economic history by embedding the emergence and organisation of collective action in its multiple, inter-related contexts.

Project Description and Contribution to CAS ROH Project

The proposed research focuses on modernity and identity discourses in the writing of Muslim reformist and modernist thinkers in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the period of 1900-1945, and specifically on the so-called ‘Muslim woman question' in their work. This term refers to a set of questions related to the position Muslim women should occupy in society. Writings of both modernists and traditionalists writing at the time are replete with symptoms of an identity crisis, which they were trying to resolve through ‘their' women, to use their own rhetoric. They were influenced by both Austrian, and later Yugoslav ideas of modernisation, as well as by Islamic modernist thinkers in the Muslim world, especially Egypt and Turkey. The aim of the research is to explore the intersection between these different yet interrelated modernist discourses that formed around the crucible of adapting Islamic practices to changing political, social and cultural circumstances, and to look into the phenomenon of Islamic modernism in Bosnia-Herzegovina as one of double translation or hybridisation.

As they defended education and the unveiling of women, modernists were long believed to be defending women's liberation. However, what they were advocating actually involved the reinscription of domestic and reproductive functions of women. The changes that were brought forth by modernisation not only offered women new liberatory potentials but implied new forms of subjection, too. Connected to this is the reconceptualisation of mothering and the family, a phenomenon that has been commonly linked to nationalist issues. (Educated and unveiled) women were to be the up-bringers of responsible and capable (male) citizens and (male) members of the nation. This turn modernist thinking took in many countries - emerging nation-states, in particular. However, the situation in Bosnia was quite different. The type of nationalism espoused by certain modernist writers was in a atypical position, one which will be explored as part of this research project.

The research proposal complements the general framework of the Regimes of Historicity Project as it focuses on the responses to and adaptation of a somewhat imposed modernity in a specific Southeast European location, and on a variety of modernisation accounts aiming to overcome an imagined time lag and perceived backwardness. In addition, the inclusion of the gender and religion aspects, are believed to contribute favourably to a wider understanding of modernisation processes.

Research Project Description

Questions concerning tradition have fundamentally marked the discourses of modernity in twentieth-century Serbia. The processes of constructing national identity and utilising tradition have been defined by complex relations between diverse local traditions and different models of their perception, which were heavily dependent upon distinctive visions of the nation's prospects. A fundamental issue of any comprehensive survey of discourses of modernity and identity in twentieth-century Serbia is to explore the nature of these relations - generally elucidated by François Hartog's concept of Regimes of Historicity. One can assume that the Serbian national community constituted the mechanics and economy of its past from the standpoint of its present and, more particularly, from the vision of the nation's future.

A general tentative assumption of my research proposal reflects the idea that it was exactly the desirable image of the nation's future, which generated the construction and interpretation of Serbia's national history over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. A thorough and systematical exploration of this problem presents the primary objective of my proposed work.

Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, national history in Serbia was predominantly conceptualised according to some complex perceptions of Byzantine culture and Byzantine heritage - the latter becoming focal to any interpretation of Serbian history, its culture and identity, and permeating the diversity of disciplinary regimes. Multifaceted and changeable historical relations were re-interpreted along stereotypical formulations - the latter meant to confirm an ‘innate' closeness between Serbian and Byzantine culture and thus establish the important and ideologically potent idea of cultural continuity. The nationalisation of history by appropriating Byzantine heritage and constructing the nation's ‘golden age' (a common topoi in the landscape of modern national identities of the Region), based on the implicit formula ‘Glory to come - glory in history', served a number of ideological functions and backed the political interests of the national elite. It was the image of Serbia as an evolutionised Byzantium, that was recognised as capable to sublime and evolve its underlying traditions of the Greek and Roman antiquity and, hence, legitimate itself as civilised and developable.

The core of the proposed research is to explore the discursive mechanisms that generated those complex relations between a perceived and nationalised Byzantine legacy and, on the other hand, examine the imported models of interpretation within the discourse of modernity and identity-building processes, which marked Serbia between c.1900 and the late 1940s. A working hypothesis of my study is to look for the drive for such temporal intervention in at least two ideological functions, namely, to legitimise the expansionist ideologies of the modern Serbian elite, and culturally de-stigmatise modern Serbia as an underdeveloped and uncivilised country. The general research framework will concentrate on the discursive mechanisms of this ‘temporalisation of history' in the academic disciplines - history and architecture, in particular - as they were vital for enforcing the thesis of a so-called Serbo-Byzantine Style based on common, European formulas of progress and evolution of the nation-states.

Research Project Description

My project is to research Romanian-language life-narratives from the period 1880-1945; to analyse their contribution to regimes of historical consciousness in Romanian culture; and to place them in the broader comparative context of global research into life narratives and personal identity.

Research in the broader field of Southeast European Studies has mainly considered collective identities - notably class, ethnicity and religion. In this context, much has been said about the role of historiographical narratives in constructing such identities. Less attention has been paid, however, to historical narratives, which present individual life stories or personal experiences of identity; despite the fact that individual motivations may lie behind the creation of many of the important written sources which historians use to talk about collective identities or alterities. Nor has this apparently ‘literary' problem been much attended to by literary historians. Although such narratives exist in vast numbers in most East European literary cultures, analysis of them is absent from nearly all standard literary histories, which focus heavily on the novel, poetry and drama. My key aim is to theorise life narratives as a ‘public identity interface', a site where an individual's multiple identities and allegiances both result from encounters with the wider world, and at the same time produce a portrait of that world - ‘the world through which I have passed'. Individual narratives therefore both reflect some engagement with wider social realities, and constitute themselves as a site from which judgement is passed on those realities. This autobiographical process has been seen as foundational to historical understanding.

My framework of interpretation will draw on ideas from the classic theorists of ‘historicity regimes' (Koselleck, Rüsen, White, Hartog). It is proposed to place these ideas - principally about temporality, emplotment and orientation - in a broader context of ideas about narrative, as developed principally by literary theorists and narratologists. A special focus will be placed on the relationship between temporal and spatial regimes, in an attempt to rectify the so-called ‘devaluation of place in social science' and ‘the neglect of space in the study of narrative'. Specifically within the framework of the project, I plan to execute two foundational studies. I am less attempting a global survey of the field than investigating a series of emblematic sites from which it may usefully be viewed.

First, a baseline of ‘life-narrative' construction in modern Romanian culture will be established by analysing two ‘canonical' texts in Romanian literature and paradigmatic spatial-temporal representations of personal life experience in Ion Ghica's Letters to Vasile Alecsandri and Ion Creangă's Memories from Childhood. Their personal contribution to the consolidation of national memory, in the form of semi-‘official' autobiographies in the decade following national independence will be of particular interest to my work. Viewed as world-building narratives, Ghica and Creangă's texts can shed critical light on the tradition-modernity dichotomy so frequently invoked in the interpretation of Romanian culture.

Second, I propose a new analysis of the concepts of temporal and spatial experience in the writings of the young Mircea Eliade, who displayed in early youth a pronounced obsession both with space and ‘spiritual itineraries' in a variety of literary modes. This was related to an explicitly proclaimed project to move beyond the national in Romania's post-1918 period and concentrate at once on personal experience and themes of universal significance. So far, Eliade's work has both been interpreted positively as ‘having discovered a wavelength on which spirit of place can communicate with the spirit of the wider world', but also denounced as symptomatic of an egocentric nationalism. My more specific interest here is in considering how this theorist and historian of religions, who in his classic 1957 work on The Sacred and the Profane placed sacred space on a prior plane to that of time, represented his experience of formative encounter with the wider world to his narrower linguistic community, through the medium of life narrative, thus producing a portrait of all three objects: self, community, world. My working thesis is that the third of these objects is narrated to the second through the medium (and interests) of the first.

project outline

While addressing various issues with regard to the reception of Aristotle's political philosophy, the proposed study will suggest that pre-modern as well as modern Aristotelians fruitfully modified and adapted it to the challenges of two different theoretical contexts: (a) justifying monarchy by demonstrating that a political community could be best represented and therefore ruled by a single ruler, in the case of pre-modern Aristotelians; and (b) emphasising the need of virtue in politics as an amendment to modern liberal theories, in the case of neo-Aristotelians. On the other hand, the study will seek to determine the exact parameters in which such problematic uses of Aristotelian arguments diverted from Aristotle's authentic understanding of politics. Special attention will be paid to his conviction that virtuous monarchy was the best form of political rulership, which can be sharply contrasted to both Aristotelian traditions in question.

Project Outline

The history of Montenegrin identity debates in the first half of the twentieth century has been relatively little known even to Balkan specialists. However, competing visions of the country’s past and future, the increasingly contested nature of national identity of the predominantly Orthodox population (defined either as Serb or exclusively Montenegrin) and other themes of intellectual debates deserve more attention for their relevance in the wider ex-Yugoslav, Balkan and East European contexts. This interesting but generally overlooked history of Montenegrin intellectual debates in the first half of the 20th century provides several new examples of historical myths and narratives, competing national projects, visions of past and future, discursive battles over identity, cases of domestication and transformation of ‘Western’ ideas and concepts. Hence, the research project aims at

• A careful reconstruction of the emerging identity discourses in Montenegro between 1900 and 1945;
• An analysis of their strategies, origins, and contribution to the modernity debates there, and the ways they influenced economic reasoning;
• The documentation of the spread of European ideas in early-twentiethcentury Montenegro (especially those of an alleged racial purity), resulting from multifaceted receptions, domestication processes, and intraregional transfers there.

At a wider scale, the project hopes to contribute to a better understanding of the intellectual history of Yugoslavia. Montenegro was often regarded as a peripheral part of the ‘Serb ethnic space’; nevertheless, its distinctive political history and perceived racial qualities of its population significantly influenced the development of modern concepts of Serbian identity.

The research proposes a new assessment of the Montenegrin material, which can provide some fresh insights especially in comparison with other cases of ‘delayed’ and similarly contested ethnic groups throughout the Region (Macedonians, Bosniaks/Muslims, Ruthenes etc.), and whose modern national identity developed during the twentieth century.

Project Outline

The research project attempts to deal with the modernist and nationalist discourses in Turkish and Greek musicological traditions in the first half of the twentieth century. Its interdisciplinary research agenda is an extension of my PhD thesis on The Cultural Identifications of the Greek Urban Elite: Discourse on Music in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Constantinople, in which I try to elucidate the process of formation of a conception of Greek identity through musical discourse.

Starting from the first decades of the twentieth century, Turkish intellectuals appropriated a discourse of progressivism regarding the music of the Ottoman court. Especially after the foundation of the new State, this discourse converged with a temporal judgment of ‘belatedness’, which was defined against the centuries-old polyphonic tradition of the West. This study tracks down the nationalist ideological formulations and the strategies of defending a reformist agenda in cultural politics, through an analysis of the canonised texts of Turkish musical scholarship.

Both Turkish and Greek musicians of the post-romantic period (1900-1945) admired the representatives of the nationalist music schools of Russia and northern Europe for their usage of folkloric elements. The project analyses the musicological concepts that came into use during the period 1900-1945 in Turkey and Greece, with regard to their relationships to the general communicational framework and the discursive field in which they were employed. The latter bore the impact of certain cultural and historical peculilaries of the two countries under investigation, where certain notions of temporality like a constant expression of ‘lagging behind’ the European nations prevailed.

By presenting the writings of the Turkish and Greek musicians of the period 1900- 1945, the proposed research intends to provide an insight for a better understanding of the making of national traditions after the dissolution of the continental Empires. A comparison of the Turkish and Greek texts - read in an innivative, diachronic and comprehensive way - is expectd to yield interesting observations regarding the rationalist, romantic or other approaches toward music in Turkey and Greece.

Project Outline

The project aims at studying patterns of extra-legal dispute settlement in post-Communist Bulgaria. It analyses the way disputes between economic agents were settled in the period 1992-1993, and what legal and extralegal mechanism were adopted in the process. Evidence suggests that the role of mafia-like organisations in the protection of property rights and dispute settlement diminished towards the end of the 1990s. Hence, the research project builds upon the hypothesis that by the end of the 1990s, informal business practices and mechanism had emerged to secure property rights, and various strategies had been employed to protect entrepreneurial businesses against disloyal partners, predation, and crime. This might be because state institutions designed to protect property rights and enforce contracts had been strengthened by the end of the period under consideration.

It is the project's goal to test these hypotheses against the available empirical evidence, create an additional, independent data-pool by collecting case-studies on different industries, survey statistical data on the various aspects of doing business in Bulgaria in the period 1992-1993, and bolster the quantitative data with semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs.

The proposed research falls into an area, which has been under-explored so far. It hopes to contribute to the analysis of extra-legal institutions interpreted as a response to low trust in formal institutions, and hence shed additional knowledge on the relationship between institutions and social trust. While the study does not aim to challenge the relative importance of formal and informal institutions for the protection of property rights in Bulgaria, it hopes to elucidate the context in which informal institutions emerged, and deal with the types of dispute settlement practices that prevailed in the early 1990s.

Project Outline

Political misrepresentation has been relatively under-explored. To quote authorities in the field, political scientists tend to treat this issue as an aberration, which is to be naturally corrected by democracy by means of developing proper legislation. Sociologists are interested in explaining the social causes and effects of misrepresentations. The currently prevailing taxonomy, however, does not offer a test able to detect impediments to participation, or identify methods for silencing, and/or monopolising frame-setting activities. Therefore, it is a commonplace for sociologists and political theorists to study post-1989 East European democracies along a minimalist logic of political misrepresentation, by resorting to some stratification theory. If applied to the Bulgarian case, this, however, would prove a rather uneasy task as the latter is far more complex in its social model, and it will be impossible to split and analyse it in three simplistic social groups - the winners (the elites), the losers, and the minorities.

The prime object of study of the proposed research work is the legislative actions passed against possible political misrepresentations in post-1989 Bulgaria. Analysing the rationality of these actions is part of the project's objective. The project interprets rationality as a set of ‘in-order-to' and ‘because' motives, and hence, it sets out to describe these motives by developing grounded theories of explanation. It claims that the bulk of the ‘because' motives cannot be reduced to standard explanatory causes, such as violations of democracy. On the contrary, the project expects to link these motives to responses to social mistrust rather than view them as an expression of political hypocrisy.

The proposed research addresses four major types of cases of political misrepresentation, namely, deficient representation (where portions of the public remain unrepresented), inauthentic representation (linked to violations of election procedures), insincere representation (i.e. not acting in the best interest of the constituents), and inadequate representation (not acting out the will of the constituents). Election laws and amendments of the Penal Code concerning election fraud, too, are analysed as a possible counteragents against political misrepresentation.