Entangled Histories of the Balkans - Volume Four

The present volume is the last in the Entangled Balkans series and marks the end of several years of research guided by the transnational, “entangled history” and histoire croisée approaches. The essays in this volume address theoretical and methodological issues of Balkan or Southeast European regional studies―not only questions of scholarly concepts, definitions, and approaches but also the extra-scholarly, ideological, political, and geopolitical motivations that underpin them. These issues are treated more systematically and by a presentation of their historical evolution in various national traditions and schools. Some of the essays deal with the articulation of certain forms of “Balkan heritage” in relation to the geographical spread and especially the cultural definition of the “Balkan area.” Concepts and definitions of the Balkans are thus complemented by (self-)representations that reflect on their cultural foundations.

Roumen Daskalov is professor of modern history at the New Bulgarian University and at the Central European University. He is the author of nine books, most recently Debating the Past: Modern Bulgarian History from Stambolov to Zhivkov (Budapest: CEU Press, 2011).

Diana Mishkova is associate professor in modern and contemporary Balkan history. Between 1988 and 2005 she taught at Sofia University. Since 2000 she has been the director of the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia. She has published on comparative nineteenth-century Balkan history, the history of nationalism, and the comparative modernization of Balkan societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Tchavdar Marinov received his PhD in history and civilizations from École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 2006. He is the author of The Macedonian Question from 1944 to the Present: Communism and Nationalism in the Balkans (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010) (in French). He has written several articles, most notably on the history and historiography of the Macedonian question, as well as on the construction of cultural heritage and the invention of national architecture in Bulgaria.

Alexander Vezenkov is a freelance scholar based in Sofia. His research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban history and the institutional history of the communist regimes, as well as various aspects of the Tanzimat period in the Ottoman Empire. He is the author of the book The Power Structures of the Bulgarian Communist Party, 1944–1989 (Sofia: Ciela, 2008) [in Bulgarian].