Individual projects

Although small in percentage, until September 9, 1944 in Bulgaria there was an influential layer of large landowners. The so-called chiflikchii owned large farms mainly in Dobrudja, which was returned to the borders of the country with the Craiova Agreement of 1940. In addition to adapting to the change of state borders, this stratum would soon experience a change of regime. If initially the new communist government was relatively tolerant of the big landowners, then at the end of 1947 the regime began a serious attack on them as "kulaks". In my research I will follow the liquidation of large land holdings in the region of Dobrudja, which in terms of historiography has so far remained in the shadow of the general processes of collectivization in Bulgaria.

The present project proposes an analysis of the struggles for rights and against discrimination of migrant female care workers based on the case study of Bulgarian migrants in Spain and Greece. Informed by the literature on migration and decoloniality on the one hand, and the literature on social movements on the other, the project seeks to contribute to a dialogue between theoretical perspectives and geographical contexts, as well as to make a novel empirical contribution. It raises the issue of the unequal geographical distribution of mobilizations and organization of women workers in the care sector under similar problems and conditions, and the need for a more nuanced understanding of the factors that contribute to an organization that targets labour, women and migrant´s rights and those that inhibit it. Through the use of qualitative methodologies, the project aims to collect data that will help to build a comparative overview between Bulgarian migrants in different countries, between mobilised and unorganised women workers and between different generations of Bulgarian migrants in terms of struggles for their rights.

The project aims to analyse the migrations of Turkish and Muslim communities from Bulgaria to Turkey during the interwar period interpreted through the prism of population politics and state- and nation-building processes. Employing the approaches of entangled histories and transnational history, the study will investigate comparatively how Bulgaria and Turkey developed specific strategies to homogenise the previously demographically heterogeneous territories along ethnic, religious, and cultural lines. The project will trace how migration flows and border crossings were affected by the redefinition of citizenship boundaries, identity categories, acceptance frameworks, and social hierarchies. By examining the historical dynamics of the Turkish and Muslim resettlements, the research will situate population movements and displacements within the larger framework of the two nation states’ policies and practices of ethnic and demographic engineering. The focus is on the construction, negotiation, and transformation of nationhood and the different government strategies towards “desired” and “undesired” nationals, categorised within the frameworks of majority and minorities. The study will further trace the ways in which these categories were instrumentalised in different visions of national integrity.

The object of study is Ferdinand de Saussure’s implicit project for linguistic semiology. We propose a clear delimitation of a notion of semiology, distinguished from the notion of semiotics. The extent of this new notion of semiology would be explored by means of researching the early stages of structural linguistics as attested in Saussure’s writings, both published and manuscript. According to the initial presupposition, the revision of basic tenets of structuralism and semiotics with regards to Saussure’s original project of semiology would provide us with a new set of ideas about how to understand signification and human signifying activity as a whole. As an interpretative prism to this semiological framework, we propose to reconsider the problem of language materiality, since it is precisely the question of materiality that stands out in the latest research on Saussure’s legacy. As a subsequent step, this new semiological understanding, both of natural languages and of other signifying systems, could be applied to the research of literature – understood as an organised signification, – or even to other fields of human activities where signs are involved.

Тransnationals: Consuls and the Making of the Modern Balkans (1787-1908) examines the role of consuls in the creation of new nation-states, the establishment of economic interdependencies, and the rise of new notions of citizenship in the nineteenth-century Balkans. The project aims to bring together insights from history, urban studies, migration studies, law and economics, and the digital humanities to map and analyze the way in which consular networks reconfigured urban spaces in the late Ottoman Empire and the various new nation-states that emerged in Southeastern Europe. It seeks to answer the question of what role consuls played in the making of the modern Balkans at the intersection of state formation, imperialism, and new notions of citizenship.

The project is designed as a longue durée study of extralegal detention in one country asking broader questions about the repressive potential of the modern state. It will provide, for the first time, a thorough account of civilian internment, concentration camps, and forced labor in Bulgaria during the 20th century. The research aims to challenge the basic assumptions of Bulgarian historiography about the nature of these repressive practices and institutions as unique to only totalitarian dictatorships by offering a different perspective on their origins, development, and history in Bulgarian context. Informed by the recent global turn in the study of concentration camps the project will integrate the Bulgarian case into the wider European and global perspective.

The deep seabed contains several critical minerals for the future of humanity and the planet: copper, cobalt, nickel, zinc, as well as lithium and rare-earth elements. Over the next two decades, a substantial surge in the global consumption of these minerals and of the related mining activities is expected. The major reason for this comes for the upcoming low carbon energy transition. Despite these growing pressures, currently the exploitation of the deep seabed in not regulated: hence a framework to deep seabed governance is urgently needed. In light of these considerations, this project focuses on the governance properties and structures that deep seabed governance should include/be provided with in order to work in the public interest. Given the looming critical mineral’s mining threat, deep seabed governance risks being captured by the, possibly predatory, elites supporting the extractive industry. To obviate this danger, the project contends that deep seabed governance must be legitimate and procedurally just in order to gain standing, i.e., to be socially recognized as commanding respect. In particular, the project’s goal is to investigate and outline legitimate and procedurally just deep seabed governance with the standing necessary for it to work in the public interest.

In a period of state reconstruction and bureaucratization, non-Muslim officials' employment is an essential feature of the expanding modern Ottoman bureaucracy. It is a generally shared observation but has not been tested thoroughly by resorting to quantitative methods and archival materials. My project deals with a solid and consistent sample involving a coherent group with representative characteristics of the bureaucracy and its Christian and Jewish members. I recently completed a three-year-project aiming to identify non-Muslim officials. All Christians (Armenian, Greek, Bulgarian etc.) and Jews employed in the civil administration were part of the research spectrum. The statistical survey's primary basis was the personnel registers kept in 1879-1914, consisting of 201 large volumes that provided information on 52,000 Ottoman officials. We find out that almost 3.000 non-Muslims (5.7% of total) worked in the Ottoman civil service. Within this project's framework, Dr. Kirmizi will examine the social and educational backgrounds and careers of Christian officials. The aim is to better understand the Christian officials' position in the Ottoman bureaucracy and their roles in it.

Beginning in the eighteenth century (South Asia) and nineteenth century (Central Asia), an age of city-states gave way to an age of imperialism, which brought with it a new political form: the protectorate, a semi-colonial form of government characterized by indirect imperial rule. Local dynasts were left ostensibly in charge of their domain, but were also answerable to colonial authorities. As indirectly ruled territories of the British and Russian empires respectively, Hyderabad and Bukhara provide something of a natural experiment: structurally similar political entities enmeshed in a single culture of Perso-Islamic documentation. This project is thus at once comparative and transregional. How was the role of Islamic scholars transformed under indirect colonial rule? And how did semi-colonial status contribute to the development of characteristics that we associate with the modern state? Having already conducted important archival work in Russia, Uzbekistan, and India, this fellowship would provide a critical opportunity to begin drafting the book manuscript.

For centuries Troy and its tragic heroes served as exempla of audacious aggression, spectacular reversals of fortune, and migration as a regenerative force in history. In places as diverse as Madrid and Moscow, Britain and Bulgaria a fascination with Troy and its resilient refugees captured the imagination of medieval patrons. Ultimately, the story of Troy after antiquity foregrounds forced migration and cultural confrontations as cornerstones of the global historical process. Remarkably no comparative, cross-cultural study of medieval visual representations of Troy currently exists. Using unpublished and published illustrated manuscripts I am pursuing a new, interdisciplinary book project which focuses on intellectual and visual constructions of Troy in the medieval imagination. This project engages with such subjects as migration, imagined origins, usable pasts, trauma, gender tropes, and visualizations of violence.  This study moves well beyond the familiar Troy stereotypes such as the Trojan horse or Helen as the possessor of a ‘face that launched a thousand ships.’ This book is the first comparative, cross-cultural exploration of this subject across western medieval and eastern Christian cultural communities. I am applying for the Advanced Academia Fellowship in order to evaluate one of the most famous Bulgarian medieval manuscripts in comparative perspective. The Vatican Manasses manuscript (Vat. Slav. 2), which was produced for Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria in the mid-fourteenth century, features a fascinating visual adaptation devoted to Troy.