Throughout Bulgarian history, the dominant pattern of gender relations has always been the patriarchal one. Since 1989, the wind of change in restructured Europe has blown into Bulgaria many new cultural, political and social ideas and influences, but has subdued little of the conservative values and normative gender discourse. In fact, women‘s position in the public and the private spheres did not change much during the transitional period and consequent democratisation and restructuring of the economy, throughout which, Bulgarian women faced numerous challenges in balancing work/leisure and family. Yet, no comprehensive research study exists, which explores the problematics of the work-leisure relationship for the generation of women that came of age during this transitional period. This research study examines the work and leisure meanings for full-time employed, Generation Y, women in Sofia (Bulgaria) in order to shine light on the way they negotiate gendered constraints in everyday life and propose areas for further investigation. To accomplish this aim, feminist, case study methodology is utilised. Moreover, the epistemological problematics of the feminist research process are addressed by the researcher‘s reflexivity and authoethnography. The method of personal narrative is chosen to reflect the invisibility of neoliberal structural constraints and situates personal experiences in the process of existing inequalities. Thus, a better understanding of the role and position of the researcher in this study is presented. The research findings illustrate the ways leisure and work meanings are constructed in the context of post-feminist guise of equality, in which, young Sofian women are now attributed with capacity. This is exemplified by participant‘s conceptualisations of work, leisure and gender culture. Individual women express contradictory view about gender roles, femininity and masculinity that illustrate a collective sense of rejection of feminism (in its mainstream sense) as a threat to heterosexual gender relations. Findings reveal that Generation Y, Sofian women‘s femininity does not necessarily fit into a simple polarity, that is either 'traditional‘ (women as wives/mothers and labourers) or 'modern‘ (assimilating to 'Western‘ values and lifestyles). Rather, their identities relate to both of these selves and are becoming increasingly hybrid and fluid. Their leisure is central life pursuit and arguably exists to empower women to resist gender inequalities, perpetuated by both new and old gender discourses and ideologies. Drawing from the contemporary field of feminist leisure studies with a an explicit focus on interdisciplinarity and post-structural feminisms the study wishes to contribute to existing debates on women‘s multiple leisure meanings and leisure as an experiences that empower individuals and, more broadly, challenge cultural norms about women‘s embodied capacities. Finally, management and operational bodies of the leisure industries can potentially use this case study to facilitate leisure opportunities, services and products for Generation Y, Sofian women, who are now active participants in the capitalist, consumer culture.

M.A. / The aim of this dissertation is to illuminate critically the political implications of Bulgaria’s membership of the European Union (EU) from a domestic perspective. In particular, this research paper will focus on the political implications of Bulgaria’s EU membership with regard to citizenship, identity and the development of Bulgaria’s future relationship with the EU. This research paper will be explained by the theoretical tradition of the multi-level governance approach, which assumes the involvement of multiple levels of governance (supra-national, national and sub-national) in the process of European integration.

This study examined marginalia and colophons in South Slavic manuscripts to establish their value as primary historical source documents. The evidence of a "history from below" was compared with other primary sources to provide an understanding about the lives of Bulgarian Christian Slavs during the Ottoman period and a history of their language, scripts, and book production. The Ottoman Empire invaded Bulgaria in 1393, to remain in power there until 1878. During that time, scribes preserved Bulgarian literary heritage by copying manuscripts. They also recorded in the margins of the manuscripts their thoughts and perceptions, formal transactions of the church, and interactions between the church and its community. While the first marginalia were prayers for forgiveness, later marginalia became a somewhat hidden repository of the marginalized voices of the Ottoman Empire: clergy, readers, students, teachers, poets, and artists who repeatedly started with "Da se znae" (Let it be known). This study analyzed the 146 manuscripts in the Historical and Archival Church Institute in Sofia, Bulgaria (HACI) that contain marginalia and colophons. Content analysis of the corpus yielded 20 categories that clustered into six thematic groups: religious texts; marginalia related to book history and production; interactions between the readers and the book; interaction between the Church and the religious community; to historical events; the cosmos and natural history. This study employed a triangulation of methods, including traditional historical and the New History "grass-roots" methods, deconstruction, critical theory, codicology, diplomatics and linguistic analysis to understand the deeper meanings of marginalia and colophons. This inter-disciplinary study can be considered the first comprehensive, systematic study of South Slavic marginalia and colophons of any magnitude to be made available to Western scholars, and the first substantiated "history from below" of the Ottoman Empire. / text

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This thesis evaluates the use of colour and light in four seventeenth-century church interiors in Arbanassi, Bulgaria. The aim is to elucidate the appearance of the wall paintings in these churches in the context of the specific use of colour and in the lighting conditions pertaining when they were painted. The investigation both uses existing methods and also creates new scientifically-based ones to address questions concerning the extent to which colour and light were intentionally employed in ways evidenced by common patterns. The underlying hypothesis is that the decoration can be asserted as an embodiment of the ways colour and light were employed in Eastern Church decoration at that period in the Bulgarian province of the Ottoman Empire. In all the churches examined the artists used palettes restricted to a small but constant number of hues. I discuss how they used light and colour contrast to manipulate the appearance of the images. As present the interiors are lit by electric light. The investigation into the interior lighting reveals that the natural lighting is of an even but low intensity, allowing the artificial lighting to dominate. I devised a methodology to assess the effect of the original interior illumination on the appearance of the naves in the con-text of Professor Chalmers and others in the computer reconstruction of historic sites under their original illumination. By departing from conventional art-historical assessments, without merely accumulating technical data, my research challenges previously accepted presumptions and offers a means of revealing the optical complexity of the interiors. While this provides increased knowledge and understanding of the visual practices employed by the artists, the wider significance of this thesis lies in the way it bridges the existing division between science and the humanities and in its development of new methods for art historical research.

Biliana Velkova-The Musical is a personal story about coming of age within two distinct ideologies, communism and capitalism and the impact of immigration and assimilation. It also gives a glimpse of my two worlds and my navigation between them. And lastly, I hope that it adds to our collective memory of communism, no matter what the reality of it was. My project becomes part of the dialogue that is currently surfacing around the relevance of post communist realities and discourse.

Biliana Velkova-The Musical is a personal story about coming of age within two distinct ideologies, communism and capitalism and the impact of immigration and assimilation. It also gives a glimpse of my two worlds and my navigation between them. And lastly, I hope that it adds to our collective memory of communism, no matter what the reality of it was. My project becomes part of the dialogue that is currently surfacing around the relevance of post communist realities and discourse.

A connection is often drawn between the way the media represent ethnic minorities and the way majorities perceive them. This paper seeks to investigate further this link by drawing parallels between media portrayal of ethnic minorities in Bulgaria and the majority's attitude towards them. In addition it introduces the results of an online survey in which 250 people took part that directly studies the effects of negative media portrayal on the subject's attitude towards ethnic minorities in Bulgaria.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Full text release at OhioLINK's ETD Center delayed at author's request