site.btaEuropean Research Council President Meets with Bulgarian Team in Leviathan Project

The President of the European Research Council (ERC) Prof. Maria Leptin met on April 10 with the team of the project Taming the European Leviathan: The Legacy of Post-War Medicine and the Common Good at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore with the Ethnographic Museum of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (IEFEM-BAS),  said the BAS press centre.

The meeting was attended by BAS President Acad. Julian Revalski, the Deputy Director of IEFEM Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ivanka Petrova and Prof. Jose Labastida, Head of the Support to the Scientific Council at the European Research Council.

The European Leviathan is a project with the participation of Bulgarian scientists, funded by the European Council for Science in the Synergy category. It will be on for six years and the team will work until 2026.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Anelia Kasabova is in a team of four leading researchers together with Prof. Dr. Volker Hess, Director of the Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine; Prof.  Judit Sándor from the Faculty of Political Science, Legal Studies and Gender Studies of the Central European University, Budapest/Vienna; and Ulf Schmidt, a professor pf modern and contemporary history at the University of Hamburg.

The project is dedicated to the history of Europe after the Second World War, considered through the perspective of medicine.

"We hope that our research will contribute to a balanced dialogue about the recent past with all its contradictions and complexities," said Assoc. Prof. Kasabova. She noted that despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, the project is currently successful. A temporary structural unit "Medical Anthropology" has been established at IEFEM-BAS. Since last year, scientists have presented the results of their research in a series of seminars.

Assoc. Prof. Kasabova noted that the activities of the project scientists from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences show that they develop science at a high level and have the capacity to be an equal partner in international research.