I was born in Bulgaria and grew up in Varna, a resort town and a large port on the Black Sea. After graduating from the English Language High School in Varna in 1994, I came to the United States to pursue a bachelor’s degree at Franklin and Marshall College. In 1998, I graduated from Franklin and Marshall College with a double major in Government and French and a minor in Asian Studies. After Franklin and Marshall, I moved to Stanford in September 1998 to pursue a PhD in Political Science. My dissertation field research took me to China (where I spent 18 months taking advanced Chinese and conducting fieldwork in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong), Taiwan, Russia, the Czech Republic, and France. I completed my dissertation in the fall of 2003 (my PhD was conferred in March 2004) and spent Spring 2004 on a post-doctoral fellowship at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard.
In July 2004, I moved to Dartmouth College to begin a tenure-track appointment as Assistant Professor of Government. During my years at Dartmouth, my research was supported through an An Wang Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Research at Harvard (2005-2006) and a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2010-2011). In July 2011, I accepted a tenured appointment as Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane University. After moving to Tulane, I was appointed Distinguished Guest Fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (August-December 2011) and received a Berlin Prize, which allowed me to spend January-June 2012 as an Axel Springer Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2011-2013, I was also a member of a cohort of twenty young China scholars selected by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations to participate in the Public Intellectuals Program. I received visiting fellowships from the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki (which allowed me to spend August 2013, May-June 2014, and May 2016 in Finland) and a fellowship from the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, which made it possible to spend 2016-17 at Princeton. I have used these grants to advance my research on China and on comparative authoritarianism.
Having served as Director of the Asian Studies Program in 2014-16, I am currently Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane. I am also a non-resident Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard and Chair of the Resilience of Authoritarianism Working Group at the Holbrooke Forum for the Study of Diplomacy and Governance Statecraft in the 21st Century at the American Academy in Berlin. In addition, I currently serve as the Associate Editor for Asia of the journal Problems of Post-Communism.
My research so far has resulted in a book that was published by Cambridge University Press in 2009 (Piracy and the State: The Politics of Intellectual Property Rights in China); in an edited volume that was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013 (Why Communism Did Not Collapse: Understanding Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Asia and Europe); in a book on the political logic of socialist consumption published in Bulgarian by Ciela Publishers in 2018 (Politicheskata logika na sotsialisticheskoto potreblenie); in a special issue on Media Control in China (published by Problems of Post-Communism in 2017); and in journal articles and book chapters published in English, Chinese, Bulgarian, Hungarian, and German. Currently, my top research priority is to complete a book manuscript entitled Dictatorship and Information: Autocratic Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China and two edited volumes: Popular Authoritarianism: The Quest for Regime Durability and China-Cuba: Trajectories of Post-Revolutionary Governance.
I am not a Latin Americanist, but I have a strong interest in Cuba, where I have conducted fieldwork in 2013 and 2015. My fascination with Cuba stems from the opportunity it offers us to think about comparative communism (this is the intellectual impetus behind China-Cuba: Trajectories of Post-Revolutionary Governance, one of the edited volumes I am currently working on) and about the tools that are used by the regime to ensure regime resilience (this led to my article “The Functions of Letters to the Editor in Reform-Era Cuba,” which is forthcoming in the Latin American Research Review in March 2019).
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