Maria Todorova

No, this is not a mistake. Intellectually obscene as it may sound, the titles of the IWM lectures in Human Sciences at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna were inspired by Mission Impossible, the Tom Cruise film series. And while, at my age, I cannot perform Cruise’s physical stunts, even imagining the tricky mountainous terrain of the Balkans (and their trickier history) can often cause vertigo. Still, there is nothing comparable to looking down from a mountain peak in the Balkan mountains and I do have my stunts making the mission possible.

Maria Todorova will deliver the IWM Lectures in Human Sciences 2024.

Maria Todorova spent six months at the IWM to work on her project. A book length project on the making and meaning of a national hero in the Bulgarian context, based on the mythology and symbolism around Vasil Levski from the mid-19th century until the present.

Publications include Imagining the Balkans, Oxford 1997 (translations into German, Italian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Greek, Romanian, Slovenian, and Turkish, Albanian, Macedonian, Croatian, Hungarian); Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern: Demographic Developments in Ottoman Bulgaria, Washington 1993; England, Russia and the Tanzimat, Sofia 1980 / Moscow 1983; “Does Russian Orientalism Have a Russian Soul?”, in: Kritika, 1 (4), Fall 2000