Dr Veneta Ivanova

Am Planetarium 7 | 07743 Jena
Phone: +49 (0) 3641 9 44082
venetta[dot]ivanova[at]gmail[dot]com

Veneta Ivanova is an intellectual and cultural historian of Eastern Europe and the Balkans who obtained her PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is a Research Fellow at the “Unit for Balkan, Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Studies” of the Research Centre for Modern History at Panteion University for Social and Political Sciences, Athens. She has been a RE-LINK Advanced Academia Fellow at the Center of Advanced Studies (CAS), Sofia and Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. She was a Visiting Assistant Professor of East Central European History at the College of William & Mary, where she taught courses in modern and contemporary European history, East Central Europe, and a seminar “History of Hope: Utopian Movements of the 20th Century.” She has also taught courses on cultural history of Eastern Europe and history of the modern Balkans at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Her previous research centered on the interplay between socialism, occultism, religion, science and utopia in twentieth-century Europe.

Research project at the Kolleg

“The Grand Time of the Intelligentsia”?: Bulgarian Intellectuals Straddle the Transition (late 1980s–early 2000s)
My project explores how Bulgarian intellectuals – writers, poets, artists, philosophers, academics, theater and film directors – experienced first the liberal-intellectual, and then the social revolution engendered by the transition from state socialism to neoliberal capitalism. It traces the shifting roles of intellectuals from the mid-1980s to the first decade of the 21st  century, with a particular focus on the early years of the transition when emblematic public intellectuals entered politics and assumed key positions of power (such as head of state, vice president, members of parliament, and leaders of political parties). Paradoxically, while intellectuals were instrumental to the demise of communism and main protagonists of the transition, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, they became culturally and socially marginalized. My project explores the conditions – local, regional and global – that led to this marginalization, together with its outcomes. Based on state archives, diaries, memoirs, publications in the press, television coverage, and oral interviews, 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. Capturing the particular experiences of Bulgarian socialist intelligentsia under post-socialism, I seek to make broader theoretical arguments about the entanglement between cultural producers, social engagement and political impact in the twenty-first century.

Main areas of research

• Cultural history
• Intellectual history
• Socialism and postsocialism
• Eastern and Southeastern Europe
• Socialism and religion
• History of science 
• Theories and philosophies of modernity
• History of utopian movements

Positions and memberships

Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES)
Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft e.V