Personal profile

Biography

 

Adelina Angusheva-Tihanov studied at the National High School for Ancient Languages and Cultures, Sofia, Bulgaria. She graduated from the University of Sofia “St Kliment of Ohrid,” Bulgaria with BA in History and Theory of Culture, and  MA in Slavic Studies, and MA in Medieval Studies from the Central European University, Budapest/  SUNY. She holds a PhD in Medieval Slavic Literature (University of Sofia, 1995) with a thesis on the divinatory literature and a post-doctoral degree Licence in Medieval Studies from Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, University of Toronto (2002) with a study on Gregory Camblak.

Additional Information

Research Awards

 

2019-20 John Rylands Research Institute Collaborative grant ( between UK, US & BG)

2014- CEELBAS Cultures of Translation

2007- Faculty Research & Enterprise Grant of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Lancaster University.

2001-2002 The Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, University of Toronto.

2001 Visiting Research Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh.

2000 The Veneta Elieff Fellowship, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Toronto, and a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto.

1999 Open Society Fund research grant for the project Medieval Hospitals and Medical Knowledge in Southeastern Europe.

1999 and 2007 Grants from the Hilandar Research Library and Resource Center for Medieval Slavic Studies, Ohio State University, USA, for studying microfilms of medical Slavic manuscripts kept at Mount Athos.

Research interests

Areas of Research

  • Medieval Slavic literatures (in particular rhetorical genres, prognostic and apocryphal texts)
  • The adaptation of the Byzantine cultural models amongst the Slavs
  • Medieval medicine
  • Medievalism: the uses of the Middle Ages in contemporary cultures (e.g. in advertising, cinema and literature, in architecture and in the creation of national identities etc.)
  • Balkan folk culture and popular believes and Balkan twentieth-century prose

I am the lead author in the authoritative academic History of Medieval Bulgarian Literature (Istoriia na balgarskata srednovekovna literature, Sofia: Iztok-Zapad, 2008, ed. A. Miltenova, 775 p.), with chapters on the specificity of Bulgarian mediaeval literary culture; on rhetorical works in medieval Bulgaria; on Hesychasm in Bulgaria; on Bulgarian literature of the 14th and the 15th century, including sections on Gregory Camblak, Cyprian, Dimitar Kantakuzenos and others; I am also the author of the concluding chapter. I have published a book on divinatory texts in medieval Bulgarian literature (1996), two widely-cited and used handbooks of mediaeval Bulgarian literature (1998; 2001), and numerous articles on Slavic and Byzantine apocrypha, women's health in the Middle Ages, medieval hagiography and liturgical rhetoric, post-medieval Balkan witchcraft.

Current research projects

  1. I am working on a book which explores the adaptation and exploitation of the Byzantine liturgical rhetoric in the late medieval Slavic context, using as an example the unedited sermons of Gregory Camblak (an important religious and political figure in the Balkan and Eastern Slavic milieus, d. 1419) and their Byzantine sources.
  2. Since I came to The University of Manchester in 2007, I have started a project on the Slavic translation of the polemical works of John VI Cantacuzenus with a special focus on one of the most valuable Slavic manuscripts at the John Rylands Library, Gaster 2082.
  3. In 2020 I was awarded a collaborative grant by John Rylands Research Institute to  study a nineteenth-century Bulgarian manuscript Gaster 1572 from John Rylands Library in collaboration with Prof. M.Dimitrova from the University of Sofia (Bulgaria) and Mary Allen Johnson, Director of Resource Center for Medieval Slavic Studies, OSU, US. The manuscript contains a translation of part of the Vita of St Basil the Younger -- the Journey of Theodora’s soul through the aerial tollhouses. Our study explores this eschatological–hagiographical narrative and its uses in a nineteenth-century Balkan context with its changing language and presentation and its growingly didactic message.  

Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):

  • SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being
  • SDG 7 - Affordable and Clean Energy

Areas of expertise

  • DR Balkan Peninsula
  • Medieval medical history
  • Medieval Studies
  • Divinatory Practices
  • Witchcraft
  • Byzantium
  • PG Slavic, Baltic, Albanian languages and literature
  • Medieval Slavonic literatures and languages
  • Bulgarian Literature
  • Modern Balkan Literatures
  • Liturgical rhetoric
  • Apocryphal Literature

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