Education

 

 

Princeton University

 

PhD Candidate, History of Science and Interdisciplinary Humanities Joint Doctoral Program, 2019 – Present

 

American University

 

2010-13. B.A., Interdisciplinary Studies

 

 

 

Fellowships & Awards

 

 

Fellow, Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities, Princeton University

 

Humanities Council Flash Grant Recipient

 

Graduate Fellow, Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University, 2021

 

Visiting Researcher, American Research Center in Sofia, 2016 – 2021

 

Fulbright Researcher, Bulgaria, 2014-15

 

 

 

Talks

 

 

Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, October, 2023. Julian Chehirian in conversation with Alex Baker on the exhibition “Rafi Chehirian: American Haze”.

 

University of Toronto, Ontario. September 2023. In conversation with Krasimira Butseva, Lilia Topouzova and Rohan Kulkarni about The Neighbours at University of Toronto.

 

Sofia City Gallery and Studio The Neighbours, Sofia, Bulgaria. November 2022. Artist Talk with Krasimira Butseva

 

Red House Center for Culture and Debate. Sofia, Bulgaria. September, 2015 “Psychiatry in the People’s Republic of Bulgaria”.

 

Center for Advanced Study Sofia. CAS Visiting Lecturer Series July, 2015 “The Body Speaks: Psychiatry in the People’s Republic of Bulgaria”.

 

American Research Center in Sofia May, 2015 “The Body Speaks: Psychiatric Materialism and the Subject in Communist Bulgaria”.

 

American University in Bulgaria, AUBG Talks Series. April, 2015 “Reduced to Bodies. Psychiatric Practice, Ideologies of Abnormality in Communist Bulgaria”.

 

 

Conferences

 

 

Authoritarianism: Lives, Legacies, Traumas. Centre for European, Eurasian Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. September 2023. Panel Session: Visual and Artistic Representations.

 

Art and Psychotherapy: A Critical Workshop Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Mental Health. Birkbeck, University of London. June 2022. Panel Session: Studying Creativity.

 

ICCEES – International Council for Central and East European Studies – 10th World Congress, Concordia University, August 2021. Panel Session: Staging Oral History: The Unseeable, the Unheard and the Imagined.

 

Technologies of Mind and Body in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe International Symposium, University of Nottingham, May 2019. Screening of “Excavating the Psyche” Exhibition Micro-doc.

 

Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Medicine, Harvard University, October 2019. Panel Session: State of Mind: The Spaces of Mental Health.

 

Soyuz Annual Symposium, Yale University, March 2018. Panel Session: Ritual & Care. Soyuz Research Network for Postsocialist Cultural Studies.

 

ASEEES Annual Conference, Washington, D.C. November 2016. Panel Session, Echoes of Bulgarian Communism. Excavating Nostalgia, Psychological Crisis and Memories of Violence. Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

 

RATS (Radical Ontologies for the Contemporary Past) Conference, Binghamton University, March 2016.

 

AAA Annual Meeting, Denver, November 2015. Panel Session, The Politics of Health in Post­-Soviet Eastern Europe. American Anthropological Association.

 

Publications

 

 

“Attention, Art and Psychotherapeutics.” In Scenes of Attention, An Interdisciplinary Inquiry, edited by D. Graham Burnett and Justin E.H. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023.

 

“Work and Therapy: Two Visions of the Bulgarian New Man.” In Technologies of Mind and Body in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, edited by Anna Toropova and Claire Shaw. London: Bloоmsbury, 2023.

 

“Last Pole”. The Public Domain Review. May 2020.

 

“Excavating the Psyche: A Social History of Soviet Psychiatry in Bulgaria.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 42, no. 2 (June 2018): 449-80.

 

“Reduced to Bodies. Soviet Psychiatry in the People’s Republic of Bulgaria”. In “The Body Under Socialism – Regimes and Representations”. Edited by  Daniela Koleva. 2016, Center for Advanced Study Sofia Press.)

Exhibitions

 

 

The Neighbours: Forms of Trauma. University of Toronto. September, 2023. Curated by Vasil Vladimirov

 

American Haze. Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia, PA. 2023. Curated by Julian Chehirian and Alex Baker

 

Beyond All Reason. In the Mirror of Surreal Times. Structura Gallery, Sofia. June, 2023. Curated by Gregor Jansen

 

The Neighbours: Forms of Trauma (1945-1989). Sofia City Gallery / Studio The Neighbours, Sofia. November – December, 2022. Curated by Vessela Nozharova

 

Excavating the Psyche: a Social History of Psychiatry in the People’s Republic of Bulgaria. Red House Center for Culture and Debate, Sofia. September-October, 2015. Curated by Julian Chehirian