Professor Maria Todorova is currently the Edward William & Jane Marr Gutgsell Endowed Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.[2]
She specializes in the history of the Balkans in the modern period. Her book Imagining the Balkans (1997) has been translated into fourteen languages, including German, Polish, Greek, Italian, Bulgarian, Turkish, and Albanian.[3]
Todorova's current research revolves around problems of nationalism, especially the symbolismofnationalism, national memory and national heroes in Bulgaria and the Balkans. Between 2007 and 2010, she also led an international research team of scholars on the project Remembering Communism.[4]
Todorova is well known for her work concerning the history of the Balkans. Her groundbreaking work, Imagining the Balkans deals with the region's inconsistent (but usually negative) image inside Western culture, as well as with the paradoxes of cultural reference and its assumptions. In it, she develops a theory of BalkanismorNesting Balkanisms,[9] similar to Edward Said's Orientalism and Milica Bakić-Hayden's Nesting Orientalisms. She has said of the book:
The central idea of Imagining the Balkans is that there is a discourse, which I term Balkanism, that creates a stereotype of the Balkans, and politics is significantly and organically intertwined with this discourse. When confronted with this idea, people may feel somewhat uneasy, especially on the political scene ... The most gratifying response to me came from a very good British journalist, Misha Glenny, who has written well and extensively on the Balkans. He said, 'You know, now that I look back, I have been guilty of Balkanism,' which was a really honest intellectual response.[10]
Remembering Communism: Genres of Representation. Social Science Research Council, 2010
Post-Communist Nostalgia. Berghahn Books 2012, ISBN 978-0857456434.
Remembering Communism: Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experience in Southeast Europe, (with Augusta Dimou and Stefan Troebst), CEU Press, 2014
The Bulgarian case: Women’s issues or feminist issues? (2017) In Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (pp. 30–38). Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429425776-4
^Ethnologia Balkanica, Sofia: Prof. M. Drinov Academic Pub. House, 1995, p. 37, OCLC41714232, the idea of "nesting orientalisms" in Bakic-Hayden 1995, and the related concept of "nesting balkanisms" in Todorova 1997 ...
^"Bones of contention". CLASnotes. University of Florida. November 1999. Archived from the original on 2011-06-07. Retrieved 2009-09-11.
