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
Fellow, Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities, Princeton University
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
“Modernism, Art, Therapy”. With Suzanne Hudson, Tanya Sheehan and Cris Scorza (Helena Rubinstein Chair of Education) at the Whitney Museum. February, 2025.
On Diasporic Aesthetics. Talk at The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. January, 2025.
New Media and the Archive. Talk at Maryland Institute College of Art. November, 2024.
The Psychotherapeutic Museum: Political Violence, Memory and Remediation at the 60th Venice Art Biennale. November, 2024. A talk at the Richardson Seminar on the History of Psychiatry at the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry, Manhattan, New York City.
From March to August, 2024, the Neighbours collective organized an international programme of talks in connection with the Bulgarian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale.
Swimming Pool, Sofia, Bulgaria. July, 2024. The Neighbours: Process, Stories and Collective Work.
Diffrakt zentrum für theoretische peripherie, Berlin, Germany. July, 2024. The Neighbours: Erased Histories, Traumatic Memory and Collective Care.
Cell Project Space, London, U.K. July, 2024. The Neighbors: Silenced Histories of Bulgaria’s State-led Violence (Sound Performance and Lecture).
Buna Festival, Varna City Gallery, Bulgaria. June, 2024. The Neighbours: Collective Care and Collective Practices.
Bulgarian Pavilion, Venice, Italy. May, 2024. Remembering & Bearing Witness in Local and International Contexts.
University of Regensburg, Germany. The Making of The Neighbours: The Artist Studio as a Transitory Archive or How to Visualize Silenced Histories. May, 2024.
Cultural Centre of Sofia University, Sofia, Bulgaria. March, 2024. The Neighbours from Belene to Venice: Dramaturgy of Memory.
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.