The Bulgarian Studies Association is pleased to announce that two authors are the winners of the John D. Bell Memorial Book Prize in 2024 for their outstanding publications in the field of Bulgarian Studies. Our winners are:

Victor Petrov for his book Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age behind the Iron Curtain, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England (MIT Press), 2023.

Nadège Ragaru for her book Bulgaria, the Jews, and the Holocaust: On the Origins of a Heroic Narrative, English Translation by Victoria Baena and David A. Rich, Rochester (University of Rochester Press), 2023

The Award Committee wrote in support of their choice for winners:

Victor Petrov’s Book

Victor Petrov’s book is an outstanding contribution to the field of Bulgarian studies, the history of late socialism, and the cold war. The book is a work of real original and careful scholarship that challenges long held paradigms governing our understanding of the era. (Petrov’s research mines an astoundingly deep range of sources from Indian archives to oral interviews, to Bulgarian science fiction). It places the development of the Bulgarian computer industry within a broad and deep network of global connections and, perhaps most importantly, transforms traditional understandings of COMECON and the second world into a space of market opportunities, of innovation, and growth. This is an important book that deserves to be widely read.

Nadège Ragaru’s Book

Nadège Ragaru’s book, translated from French, offers a sweeping study of the politics, geopolitics and varied tools of historical mythmaking. At the heart of the book is the tension between Bulgaria’s refusal to deport its Jewish citizens during the Second World War while failing to block the deportation of Jews from the territories it occupied in Macedonia and Thrace. Her book stands out for its deep archival work—reaching archives from the Balkans, to Israel, Germany, France and the United States—its careful use of diaries, memoirs, and interviews, and approach to the nature of collective memory. It is an important work.