Title: Race as a category of analysis for the Balkans
Maria Todorova is Edward William & Jane Marr Gutgsell Endowed Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A widely renowned scholar internationally, Prof Todorova has been honoured as Doctor honoris causa by multiple universities (University of Sofia, Bulgaria; the European University Institute, Florence; Panteion University, Athens, Greece; Fan Noli University, Korcha, Albania) and has held a succession of prestigious fellowships at universities, centres for advanced studies and institutes across Europe and in the United States of America.
Among her most recent distinctions, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2022) and received the Distinguished Contributions to Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies Award (ASEEES) in the same year. Prof Todorova is sole author of thirty-seven books (several translated into fourteen languages, including German, Polish, Greek, Italian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Chinese, and Albanian) and almost 190 articles, sole editor of four publications, and also joint editor and joint author of six books.
A specialist on the history of Balkans in the modern period, her current research centres on
Challenges associated with nationalism, especially the symbolism of nationalism, national memory
and national heroes in Bulgaria and the Balkans.
Her most recent publications include Scaling the Balkans: Essays on Eastern European
Entanglements (Leiden: Brill, 2018); The Lost World of Socialists at Europe’s Margins: Imagining
Utopia, 1870s-1920s (London: Bloomsbury, 2020); Xiǎngxiàng bā'ěrgàn (Beijing, 2020) (Chinese
translation of Bones of Contention: The Living Archive of Vasil Levski and the Making of
Bulgaria’s National Hero (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009); The Game of
Scales: Balkans, Bulgaria, Socialism (in Greek, collection of essays – Athens 2022); Imaginarni
Balkan (Sarajevo, 2023) (Bosnian translation of Bones of Contention).