Studies on Language and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe – Serie

This edited volume asks what earlier and contemporary cemeteries and memorials can tell us about manifestations of past times. How do they testify of contradictory dimensions of memorial behavior: from commemoration or celebration to forgetting? The chapters in this volume address the work of cultural remembrance connected mostly to various minority groups in East Central Europe while enquiring into tangible and intangible intertwining spheres―visible and hidden signs, traces and lifeworlds of memories, emotions, stories, and historical interpretations.

Macedonia and its Questions: Origins, Margins, Ruptures and Continuity is a multi-disciplinary book of 11 chapters, containing contributions that span the fields of linguistics, political science, sociology, history and law. The title of the book purposefully references but simultaneously interrogates and challenges the idea that certain nation-states and certain ethnicities can in some way constitute a "question" while others do not. The "Macedonian Question" generally has the status of a problem that involves questioning the very existence of Macedonians and one of the aims of this volume is to reframe the nature of the discussion.

As digital humanities in recent years have been taking roots in major international research centers, this edited volume consisting of ten papers including the introduction seeks to examine the current state of the digital/data-driven research in history and neighboring disciplines dealing with Southeast Europe as well as with the Ottoman Empire and to give an interdisciplinary impetus by bringing together international scholars working with various digital approaches. The included papers give a broad introduction into the field and follow various methods of digital analysis and visualization incorporating approaches like corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis,GIS (Geographic Information Systems), agent-based modelling, computationalstatistics etc.

John of Damascus is one of the most remarkable figures among the Church Fathers. The reception of his theological and philosophical works among the Orthodox Slavs in the Middle Ages has been comparatively well researched – unlike that of his homiletic works. This book is devoted to four Slavonic translations of three homilies of John of Damascus dedicated to the Mother of God. It offers the first comprehensive, complex study of the translations of John’s First and Third Homilies on the Dormition and his Homily on the Nativity of the Mother of God, preserved in South Slavic hagiographic and homiletic collections. The problems related to the textual tradition and translational peculiarities of these works have a central place in this study. It is supplemented with an edition of the Slavonic translations with parallel Greek text, as well as with a Slavonic-Greek and Greek-Slavonic list of content words.

The aim of this volume is to reinvent Albanian Studies and to transform Albanology, traditionally performed as a subdiscipline of historical linguistics, into interdisciplinary Albanian Studies. The thirteen contributions from early career investigators from Albania, Kosovo and Western Europe cover the field of literature, linguistics and cultural studies. They address the interface of language contact, sociolinguistics, digital humanities, comparative literature and of gender, minority, migration and memory studies. By using discourse analysis, popular culture, visual arts and other recent approaches, the volume shows the dynamics of Albanian culture in both Albanian-speaking countries today which makes it a fascinating case study in the context of Balkan area studies.

This book examines the processes of symbolic cultivation of identity promoted by Armenian cultural elites in the Bulgarian city of Plovdiv, focusing on the transmission of positive language ideologies and emotional elements related to collective memory. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and a range of primary materials, this work sheds light on the role of the Armenian alphabet in legitimizing collective visions of ‘distinctiveness’ and of the Armenian Genocide remembrance in shaping non-exclusive, transnational patterns of belonging. While contributing to the study of the complex dynamics and challenges of ‘Armenian survival’ across space and time, it situates the issue in the unique context of Bulgaria, analyzing, moreover, the impact of proximity to Turkey.

The book explores the dynamic intersections between trauma, gender and ecology issues within contemporary Slavic literatures, offering a critical lens through which cultural upheavals of post-communist spaces are examined. Through close readings of prose, poetry, and hybrid literary forms, the volume investigates how narratives from Russia, Poland and Croatia engage with the legacies of violence, displacement and ecological degradation. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from trauma studies, gender theory, and ecocriticism, the book highlights how authors reimagine identity, memory, and human-nature relationships in response to ongoing socio-political crises and environmental changes. By foregrounding marginalized voices and experimental narrative strategies, this study reveals literature's transformative potential to engage with both personal and collective wounds, while challenging dominant historical and ecological discourses.

This volume comprises nineteen contributions presented at the interdisciplinary conference Bulgarian Studies and Modern Humanities, held in Berlin in October 2024. Organised into five thematically diverse panels – Linguistics, Literary Studies, Translation/Cultural Transfer, Historiography as well as Artificial Intelligence – the papers explore the transdisciplinary intersections of these fields with Bulgarian Studies. The contributors challenge conventional boundaries of philology and prove how so-called “small philologies” such as Bulgarian Studies can make a remarkable contribution to methodological innovation within the humanities.