Diana Mishkova will talk about her book, Rival Byzantiums: Empire and Identity in Southeastern Europe (CUP 2023), which explores how the “national historians” of the modern Balkan “successor states” to the empire – Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania and Turkey – have operated with the topos of Byzantium and how, in doing so, they have been shaping the national canons of history in these countries from the Enlightenment to the present day. All this means divulging the national stakes of Byzantine studies, how it partakes in changing the understanding and writing of history, national history in particular. Her approach to this theme, therefore, concerns the mirrored reflections, not the “historical reality” of Byzantium. These reflections are also historical facts, but they belong less to the history of the Byzantine empire than to that of modern historiography. In this sense the lecture should be seen as, on the one hand, an exploration of the politics of Byzantine studies – of the images, perceptions and understandings this field has been cultivating during the last two and a half centuries – and, on the other, a critical interrogation of “Byzantium” as a historiographical construct with considerable ideological potential in shaping national history and national identity.

Diana Mishkova has specialized in modern and contemporary history of Southeastern Europe. Having taught at the History Department of Sofia University and a number of European and US universities, since 2000 she has been the director of the Centre for Advanced Study in Sofia. Her recent publications include Beyond Balkanism. The Scholarly Politics of Region Making (Routledge, 2018) and Rival Byzantiums: Empire and Identity in Southeastern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She is the editor of ten International volumes and collective monographs, among them Balkan Historiographical Wars (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), European Regions and Boundaries. A Conceptual History (Berghahn Books, 2017), ‘Regimes of Historicity’ in Southeastern and Northern Europe, 1890-1945 (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014); Entangled Histories of the Balkans, vols. 2 and 4 (Brill, 2014, 2017). Foreign Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Doctor Honoris Causa of Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden, holder of the “Danubius Award” (2022) and the “Konstantin Jireček Medal” (2023).