Irina Gigova
Associate Professor and Associate Chair
Irina Gigova is a historian of modern Eastern Europe, with a research focus on twentieth-century Bulgaria. A product of the region’s transformation after 1989, she was among the first graduates of the American University in Bulgaria and, later, the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign with a dissertation “Writers of the Nation: Intellectual Identity in Bulgaria, 1939-1953.”
Her broad research interests, which include the sociology of intellectuals, cultural production, urban history, war and memory, communism and transnational networks, have resulted in several journal articles and contributions to edited volumes. Her first book is entitled A Generation of Writers and Bulgarian Cultural Politics: From Independence to Communism, and is forthcoming with Central European University Press. A current investigation of a popular Bulgarian comics magazine aimed at children and adolescents between 1979 and 1991will be part of her next project on youth in late communist Bulgaria.
Education
Ph.D. in History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2005
M.A. in History, Central European University (CEU), 1998
B.A. in History, American University in Bulgaria (AUBG), 1996
Research Interests
Eastern Europe and Modern Europe
Intellectuals, Cultural Production, Urban, Social and Cultural History
Nationalism, Fascism, Communism
Empires, International Cold War
Historical Memory
Comics and Youth
Courses Taught
From Subjects to Citizens: Individual and State in Modern Europe
Empire, Nation and Class in Eastern Europe, 1800 to Present
Everyday Communism
The Modern City
The Historian's Craft
Russia in the World
Research Seminar: The Cold War in Europe
Fascism: History and Interpretations (graduate)
Comparative Nationalism (graduate)
Honors and Awards
Dean of School of Humanities and Social Sciences Discretionary Fund (2017)
MAYS Grant for Faculty-Student Undergraduate Research (2013)
Dean of School of Humanities and Social Sciences Discretionary Fund (2012)
Alternate for the ACLS Fellowship for Postdoctoral Research in Southeast European Studies (2008)
Selected Publications
A Generation of Writers and Bulgarian Cultural Politics: From Independence to Communism (forthcoming with Central European University Press/Amsterdam University Press)
“The Bulgarian PEN: A Study in Interwar Cultural Internationalism,” East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 34, no. 3 (August 2020): 685-711.
“In Defense of Native Literature: Writers’ Associations, State and the Cult of the Writer in pre-1945 Bulgaria,” Slavic Review 77, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 417-440.
“Communism and Its Legacy,” co-authored with Malgorzata Fidelis, in Irina Livezeanu and Klimo von Arpad, eds. The Routledge History of East Central Europe Since 1700 (Routledge, 2017): 365-414.
“The Feeble Charm of National(ist) Communism: Intellectuals and Cultural Politics in Zhivkov’s Bulgaria,” in Yana Hashamova and Theodora Dragostinova, eds. Beyond Mosque, Church, and State: Alternative Narratives to the Nation in the Balkans (Central European University Press, 2016): 151-177.
"Sofia Was Bombed?: Bulgaria's Forgotten War with the Allies," History & Memory 23, No. 2, Fall/Winter 2011): 132-171.
"The City and the Nation: Sofia’s Trajectory from Glory to Rubble in WWII," Journal of Urban History, 37, no.2, (March 2011): 155-175.
"The Feminisation of Bulgarian Literature and the Club of Bulgarian Women Writers," Aspasia: International Yearbook for Women's and Gender History of Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe, Vol. 2 (2008): 91-119.