Maria Todorova “Microhistory” is one way to put it, in the sense that by bringing to life several thousand “obscure” nineteenth-century Bulgarian socialists, I am trying to say something larger about socialism and highlight unexpected patterns and hidden connections. You ended your lecture by emphasizing the point that “ should be thinking of the International (and socialism at large) as an intersection in time, where different outlooks, held together by a shared worldview, meet, a polyphonic contrapuntal chorale.” For our readers who are not historians, can you elaborate on the approach to historical research and interpretation exemplified here? Is this what is known as “microhistory” or the privileging of “minor histories”? After the event I got the chance to ask her a few questions about the ideas she presented and the work of historians and anthropologists of Eastern Europe and the Balkans.ĮuropeNow “To the Center via the Periphery (by way of the Balkans)” is a richly detailed lecture challenging conventional wisdom about the existence of an East–West binary in early socialism. Her lecture, “To the Center via the Periphery (by way of the Balkans): Bulgarian Social Democracy and the Second International” challenged conventional wisdom about the development and diffusion of socialism in Europe. Douglass Distinguished Lecture at the 116 th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington, DC. She was recently invited by the Society for the Anthropology of Europe to give the 2017 William A. Todorova’s work has found an eager audience amongst cultural anthropologists.
More recently, she has turned her attention to questions of nostalgia and memory, continuing her impact on the fields of social and cultural history, historical demography, and historiography.Ĭoncerned as she is with social and cultural history, Prof. Widely acclaimed-with a second edition published in 2009 and now translated into 13 languages-Imagining the Balkans continues to provoke. Todorova’s seminal book, Imagining the Balkans (1997), prompted a broad conversation in the social sciences and humanities about the Balkans as location and imaginary. The name Maria Todorova is familiar to all scholars of the Balkan Peninsula and Eastern Europe.
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