Milena Methodieva is a scholar of Ottoman, Balkan, and Turkish history, 19-20th centuries. She is Assistant Professor at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto, Canada. She received her PhD from Princeton, MA from Bilkent University, Turkey, and BA from the American University in Bulgaria. She is interested in exploring history from the perspective of marginalized groups and showing their role in the historical process. Her work often looks at events in transnational context.
Milena Methodieva is the author of Between Empire and Nation: Muslim Reform in the Balkans (Stanford University Press, 2021). The book tells the story of the transformation of the Muslim community in modern Bulgaria during a period of imperial dissolution, conflicting national and imperial enterprises, and the emergence of new national and ethnic identities. It explores how these former Ottoman subjects, now under Bulgarian rule, navigated between empire and nation-state, and sought to claim a place in the larger modern world. Based on a wide array of primary sources and drawing on Ottoman and Eastern European historiographies, this work approaches the question of Balkan Muslims’ engagement with modernity through a transnational lens, arguing that the experience of this Muslim minority provides new insight into the nature of nationalism, citizenship, and state formation.
One of Dr. Methodieva’s current research project deals with migration from the Balkans to the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish republic. This project seeks to explore the varied social, political, and intellectual consequences of these mass migrations, and how individuals experienced them.