Imagining Utopia: The Lost World of European Socialists at Europe’s Margin, featuring Maria Todorova

Maria Todorova is the Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor of History and Center of Advanced Study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She teaches and researches the history of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Ottoman Empire in the modern period.

Her book Imagining the Balkans (1997), reinvigorated the field of Balkan/Southeast European studies and continues to provide the paradigm for the field. Maria Todorova’s new book is devoted to the ‘golden age’ of the socialist idea, surveying the period of the Second International. It examines the promise for an alternative socialist utopia, moving beyond traditional historiographical emphasis on ideology, into intersections of spaces, generations, genders, ideas and feelings, and different flows of historical time.

This lecture took place on February 27, 2020 at 5pm in the Social Sciences Tea Room at the University of Chicago.