In this talk, Prof Markus Wein (American University of Bulgaria) will argue that the collapse of state socialism ushered in dramatic political and economic change, producing new freedoms and opportunities, but also new challenges and disappointments.
Wednesday 13th November, 16:30 - 18:30, St Alphege Building 002 (and via MS Teams)
Focusing on labourers, professionals, youth, women, sexual minorities, foreign students, and emigrants, he will explore these multifaceted changes and people’s varied experiences of them, mainly drawing from the book Everyday Postsocialism in Eastern Europe that he recently edited with Jill Massino (University of North Carolina). Reappraising 1989 as an epochal event, the narratives featured in this book complicate hegemonic representations of transformation, revealing ruptures and continuities, progress and reversals.
Markus Wein is professor of European history at the American University in Bulgaria. His publications include Market and Modernization: German-Bulgarian Economic Relations 1918–1944 and Their Conceptual Foundations (2007); ‘Selective Knowledge Imports: The Model Villages of the Central European Economic Association in the context of the Bulgarian agricultural education system,’ in Carola Sachse, ed., Central Europe' and “Southeast Europe” as a Planning Area: Economic and cultural-political expertise in the age of the world wars’ (2010); and ’Between Peasant Dictatorship and Royal Republic: Constitutional Issues in Bulgaria 1918-2005,’ in Bernd Braun, ed., Long Live the Republic: The First World War and the End of Monarchies in Germany and Europe (2021).
Chairs: Prof. Chris Aldous (University of Winchester) and Dr Graciela Iglesias-Rogers (University of Winchester)