Dr Daniela Koleva

Daniela Koleva holds a PhD in Sociology. She is professor at the Department for History and Theory of Culture (Sofia University), member of the Academic Board of New Europe College, Bucharest and of the Advisory Board of the Institute for the Study of the Recent Past, Sofia. Her research interests are in the fields of oral history and anthropology of socialism and post-socialism, biographical and cultural memory, politics of memory and heritage. Daniela has lectured at the universities of Fribourg, Jena, Tübingen, Regensburg, Lund, Nottingham, AUBG. She has published a monograph on the 'normal life course' in socialist Bulgaria and a number of book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed international journals. She is the (co)editor of 20 Years after the Collapse of Communism: Expectations, Achievements and Disillusions of 1989 (2011), Negotiating Normality: Everyday Lives in Socialist Institutions (2012), Ageing, Ritual and Social Change: Comparing the Secular and Religious in Eastern and Western Europe. (2013), From Literature to Cultural Literacy (2014). Her last monograph 'Memory and Justice: Personal Reminiscences and Public Narratives of Communism' (2020, in Bulgarian),combines a transnational study of the memory of communism across East-Central Europe with an intense enquiry into local and generational memory in Bulgaria based on over a decade of oral history.