How is Bulgaria’s past remembered and by whom? This interactive event explores how memory culture in post-socialist Bulgaria has been reshaped by shifting political and social realities. Speakers and participants will engage in a conversation about celebrated and forgotten pasts after socialism, with examples from revived cultural traditions, public events, and protests. The conversation will shed light on the current highly volatile political atmosphere in Bulgaria, just a couple of months before another snap election, the eighth since 2020.
- Speakers:
- Prof. Yana Hashamova, The Ohio State University
- Prof. Ana Luleva, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
- Discussant
- Assoc. Prof. Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan, Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures, UCLA
(OSU alumna)
- Assoc. Prof. Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan, Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures, UCLA
- Moderator
- Dilyana Ivanova Zieske, Ph.D., Negaunee Integrative Research Center, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL
Speaker Bios
Yana Hashamova is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Slavic Studies and Professor in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts at The Ohio State University. In her interdisciplinary monographs and multi-disciplinary co-edited volumes, she explores the links between political ideology and constructions of national, ethnic, and gender identities, with a focus on power relations and post-socialist conditions.
Ana Luleva is Professor of Ethnology at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. She has published extensively in the fields of the anthropology of socialism and post-socialism, kinship and gender, cultures of trust, and memory culture. She is the author of Culture of Dis/trust in Bulgaria: Anthropological Perspectives (2021) and co-editor of several volumes, including Everyday Socialism: Promises, Realities, and Strategies (2022).
Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan (PhD, The Ohio State University) is Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures at UCLA, where she also serves as Associate Director of the National Heritage Language Resource Center. Her research focuses on monolingual and bilingual language acquisition and processing in Slavic languages, with particular emphasis on Bulgarian and Russian. She has published widely on linguistic, cognitive, and ecological aspects of heritage language bilingualism in North American diasporic contexts.
Dilyana Ivanova Zieske (PhD, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) is a Research Associate at the Negaunee Integrative Research Center, The Field Museum in Chicago, where she conducts oral history research on Bulgarian migration and community formation in the city. Trained as an ethnologist, her work focuses on migration, memory, everyday life, and transnational identities in post-socialist and diasporic contexts. She is the author of Memories of Everyday Life during Socialism in the Town of Rousse, Bulgaria (2014) and currently serves as President of the Bulgarian Studies Association.
