The meeting will be held on the following agenda:
If members do not appear at the specified time in the quorum required by the statute of the association for holding the general meeting, the assembly will be held at 7:00 p.m. on the same day and at the same address, regardless of how many participants are present.
All members of the association are invited to participate in the general meeting.
]]>The theme of the upcoming annual conference of the Bulgarian Society for the Study of the 18th Century is in line with two anniversaries that fall in 2026, that is, 150 years since the Bulgarian April Uprising of 1876 and 180 years since the publication of the first issue of the periodical Balgarsji orel (Bulgarian Eagle) by Ivan Bogorov, which marked the beginning of the history of the Bulgarian press. In line with these important jubilees that inspired our annual forum, we will welcome papers that deal more generally with the way rulers in Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and Russia exercised their power. Moreover, another thematic thread of the conference will be the attempts in the 18th and 19th centuries to undermine the established political regime with the creation of resistance movements, which often were ideologically inspired by the ideas of Enlightenment.
The context in which modern ideas about governance and its rethinking circulated in connection with the birth of the concept of “nation” was strongly influenced by the means of information, such as newspapers, magazines, brochures, and books. Their pages were an arena for constructing, comparing, and putting under question political and power narratives used by the authorities. Both the ideological and economic prerequisites for starting and stopping various periodicals, their distribution, financing, and provision will be objects of interest as well. In fact, after centuries of superiority of the manuscript tradition, through printed publications, the modern conception of the “public” gradually emerged.
The conference will take place on March 24–25, 2026, in the New Conference Hall of Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski.”
We suggest the following thematic lines:
• Theoretical approaches to the problem of power
• Enlightened rulers – power policies and practices
• Colonial policies and anti-colonial movements
• Nation projects – their realizations and failures
• Revolutionary movements in Europe, the Balkans, and Russia
• Places of resistance – the mountain, the sea, the city
• Editorial policy and press – advertising strategies, financing, distribution of periodicals
• Manuscripts and printed books – modes of coexistence
• The press as a place for debate and a means of constructing ideologies
The deadline for submission of applications (topic and abstract) is March 15, 2026 to: bulgc18@gmail.com
]]>HAIDUKS AND REVOLUTIONARIES – FACTS AND FICTIONS FROM PAST AND PRESENT TIMES
28-29 March 2025
New Conference Hall
Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”
The present call is inviting all members of our society and researchers in humanities, interested in the topic, to offer their perspectives on the topic of the haidiks, outlaws and military gangs as a Bulgarian and Balkan phenomenon during the period of Ottoman rule of 18th and 19th c. We are however widening the scope of the present forum to the identity of the revolutionaries – their romantic association with the haiduks and yet their adherence to wider European similar resistance movements during the period of the end of the empires and the evolvement of independent nations. The theme of the conference is open to scholars in history, literature, ethnography and cultural studies.
]]>PROGRESS AND STEREOTYPES IN THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURY
29–30 March 2024
New Conference Hall
Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”
Progress in all its forms and appearances – social reforms, ideas- has always been approached with suspicion and ambiguous attitudes. Optimism, admiration and enthusiasm naturally clash with distrust, stereotypes and even fear.
Confrontation with the foreign style of life and thinking can mobilize conservative standpoints and can evoke complex parallels, contradictions and counteracts in the cultural history of 18th and 19th c. in Europe and the Balkans. Similar phenomena can be traces in particular in the Bulgarian culture in its ambivalent attitude to European ideas and Modernity.
In the present call for participation we offer the following thematic areas:
We expect your resumes until 20 March 2024 at the following email: bulgc18@gmail.com
]]>27 March 2023 г. New Conference Hall
Sofia University “S. Kliment Ohridski”
We invite the members of the Bulgarian society for eighteen-century studies to send proposals for this topic, which concerns the level of credibility of use of sources materials containing facts in our research, which always contains a stage of interpretation of the primary material from the time of the European and Balkan Enlightenment . Often the echo of imprecise selection and utilization of facts reverberates later in the critical/historiographical analysis in the next generations of scholars who take the stored information as unequivocally valid. Тhus the mistakes made earlier deepen in the next period of research of a historical event or a personality stretching temporarily from 18th to 21st c. Therefore we seek proposals which not only cover the initial problematic knot but also trace its historiographical echo up to today.
The title of the conference is inspired by the approaches of Natalie Zemon Davis in her book “Fiction in the Archives” (1997) and Giorgio Agamben’ s one “Idea della prosa” (1985), to seek for inbetweenness between „versus” et “prosus”, between fact and fiction in contemporary research. How prone is the scientific study to political movements and dominant ideologies while it also intersects with different areas of humanities and natural sciences?
Deadline for proposals 15 March 2023: bulgc18@gmail.com
]]>15 NOVEMBER 2021 New Conference Sofia University “St.Kliment Ohridski”
This year the annual conference continues the topic of the previous one about the eventful nature of the book, but this time the emphasis is placed on the history of paper, its distribution and utilization in a period of three centuries from 16th to 19th century. The topic is inspired by the so called “material turn” as approach in cultural and social history, which takes into consideration not only the circulation of ideas between Europe, the Balkans and the world, but also the mobility techniques that convey these ideas, concerning financial aspects and consumption trends. The utilization of the written word, on the other hand, will be regarded in terms of its ideological potential. We are looking for the manuscripts and printed books that made changes in religious doctrines and political regimes. The revolutionary potential of words, that are put on paper can be interpreted in the light of the grand narratives of the Enlightenment – equality, fraternity, liberty, yet it can be found in the usage of vocatives, emotives and imperatives in language. The conference questions also the revolutions that stayed only on paper and did not take place. Today they are hidden in dusty archives or integrated into digital corpuses of data. Retrieving them from the shadow of history can provoke new generations of revolutionaries.
The conference will take place on 15th November 2021 at Sofia University on online depending on the epidemic situation.
Short resume (250 words), titles and bio can be sent to bulgc18@gmail.com until 30 September 2021
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Anna Ohanjanyan (Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts “Matenadaran”, Yerevan, Armenia, Pontica Magna program fellow at the NEC) will present a public lecture:
Debating Confessions: Armenian Polemical Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century
The early eighteenth century marked for the Armenians the apogee of the confessional age. In the two-fold geopolitical settings under the rule of rival Muslim (Ottoman and Safavid) Empires the Armenian ecclesiastic authors embarked on composition of confessional literature to delineate the boundaries of the Armenian ‘orthodoxy’ in the face of rising Global Catholicism. Polemical writings in manuscript and printed forms were produced by the Armenian Apostolic as well as Catholic factions in Constantinople, Amsterdam, Vienna, New Julfa in an attempt to debate on ‘true faith’ and ‘true practice’ from the point of view of their respective Churches. New communal modes of engagement with theological tradition set forth novel or rethought genres and vocabulary to meet the questions arising from the altered confessional context. While the clichés specific to polemical genre occupied significant place, the majority of the authors customized the language, vocabulary and style of their writings in an efforts to reach the target audience. The lecture will focus on the socio-political context in which Armenian polemical literature proliferated laying stresses on the synergy of inherited literary canon with the ‘novelty’ Early Modern era brought into the confessional literature of the Armenian Church.
10. July 2019, 9:00 – 10:00 AM, New Conference Hall, Sofia University “St. Clement Ohridsky”
]]>Nikolay Aretov
Quest of the Legend: Paths to Aglikina Polyana
National mythology purposefully forges narration about heroes. Those who fight for national independence have important place among them. This narration highlights and sacralizes some places, connected with important events, with battlefields, graves, etc. One such important place is Aglikina Polyana, situated in the Balkan, not far from the town of Sliven. According to folk-songs and stories this was place, where leathers of rebel gropes gather their armed men. In 1868 such famous leaders as Hadji Dimitar and Stefan Karadga set Aglikina Polyana as a place, where those who have separated from the grope must go and wait it. And this was what happened. The events were recorded in memoirs of the participants, written by Soyan Zaimov and published by Zakhari Stoyanov in 1885, both of them rebels and writers, strongly engaged in sacralizing these events.
Curiously enough their writing revealed not only the heroic deeds and suffering of the rebels, but also their disappointment and frustration in the quest of the legendary place and the legend itself. This paper traces the signs of this disappointment and frustration in the texts of St. Zaimov and Z. Stoyanov.
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