Neda Genova (Research Fellow)
Neda Genova (Research Fellow)
I work at the intersection of cultural, media and post-communist studies, by focusing on spatial and temporal transformations in Bulgaria’s post-1989 context. I am especially interested in thinking about surfaces as dynamic, material-semiotic sites, and how an engagement with specific surfaces can afford for construing complex accounts of their relationships to environments, ensembles of signification and spatio-temporal arrangements. These are questions I am exploring in my first monograph titled ‘Politics of Surfaces’ (forthcoming with Goldsmiths Press).
Other questions I engage with theoretically are the production of abstraction; research into the politics of laughter and comedy, as well as into practices of experimentation with domestic spaces.
In my research and teaching I am committed to feminist and anticolonial studies and methodologies. The thinking about the need to create conditions in which collective studying can be an emancipatory and subversive force, has led me to want to foster alternative forms of learning and teaching – within, beyond, and at the fringes of existing educational institutions.
I am a member of the editorial collective of the Bulgarian-language magazine dVERSIA - an activist-academic publication we launched in 2015, contributions to which attempt to reroute dominant narratives of post-communist transformation from a critical left perspective. As part of my work for the journal, I have authored pieces and translated a number of academic and non-academic texts, hitherto not available in the Bulgarian language.
Research Profile
Media and cultural studies; post-communist transformation; surfaces; fiction; time and politics.
Academic Profile
Prior to coming to CIM, I held teaching positions at Winchester, London South Bank and Regent’s Universities. Between 2016 and 2021 I taught various modules as an Associate Lecturer as well as a Short Course lecturer for adult learners at Goldsmiths, where I also obtained my PhD in Cultural Studies in 2019. In 2020, I was a Visiting Fellow at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig. Between 2016 and 2017 I worked as a Visiting Lecturer at the Institute for Media and Culture at the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf. I hold a BA in Media and Cultural Studies, an MA in Media and Cultural Analysis (both from HHU Düsseldorf), as well as an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths.
Current Research Projects
As a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow I am currently working on a project titled ‘Beneath the Pavement, What? Memes and Politics in Post-Socialism’.
Publications
Books
-- (forthcoming) Politics of Surfaces. London: Goldsmiths Press.
Articles
-- (2024) 'View from the Window': On Time, Politics and Domestics during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic. In: Time & Society. doi: 10.1177/0961463X241237393
-- (2023) 'Review of the Critical Meme Reader.' In: Computational Culture. A Journal of Software Studies, 9, http://computationalculture.net/review-of-critical-meme-reader-global-mutations-of-the-viral-image/
-- (2023) 'Thinking with Labyrinths: A Fictional-topological Exploration'. In: Metode, Vol. 1, 'Deep Surface'. https://metode.r-o-m.no/artikler/essay/thinking-with-labyrinths-a-fictional-topological-exploration
-- (2023) ‘The Time of Jokes in the Rubble of Post-Communism.’ In: Connections. A Journal for Historians and Area Specialists. www.connections.clio-online.net/article/id/artikel-5572.
-- (2022) ‘Politics of the Surface. Keeping Pace with the Monument of the Soviet Army in Sofia’. In: New Formations: A Journal of Culture, Theory & Politics, 106, 25-42. muse.jhu.edu/article/863660.
-- (2022) 'Recursive Lions and Strange Continuities of Bulgarian Nationalism.' In: European Review 30(4), pp. 505 - 518. doi: 10.1017/S1062798722000151
-- with van der Drift, M. (2020) A Conversation on Trans as Anticolonial Politics. In: Identities. Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, 17(2-3), 102-108.
-- (2019) Material-semiotic Transformations of the Berlin Wall in Post-Communist Bulgaria. Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, 16(1-2), 78-90.
-- (2018) Review of Boris Buden's 'Zone des Übergangs. Das Ende des Postkommunismus' In: Contradictions/Kontradikce: A Journal for Critical Thought. 2(2), p. 225-232.
-- (2018) ‘'Smart writing' Review of Sarah Kember's iMEDIA. In: Radical Philosophy 2.01, p. 126-128.
Non peer-reviewed
-- (forthcoming) Holds May Spin. In: Mesh Magazine.
-- (2023) Racism, Islamophobia and Decoloniality on the Balkans. Interview with Piro Rexhepi. In: Lefteast [Online].
-- (2021) Perfect Black Box. In: Berliner Gazette [Online].
-- (2020) 'My home is a nuthouse'. Remote Education and Care Work in Bulgaria in the Time of Coronavirus. In: Blog: Corona and Care, Friedrich-Ebert Foundation [Online].
-- (2020) Institutional Amnesia. In: Arts of the Working Class 11, p. 50. (in Bulgarian)
-- with Apostolova, and Vaissova, L. (2020) Care as Commodity. Challenges in the Care Work Sector in Bulgaria. Sofia: LevFem. (In Bulgarian)
-- (2018) 'A Better Past is Still Possible'. Interview with Boris Buden. In: Lefteast [Online].
Contact
Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL