Title: Innocents Abroad at the End of History: Last Men (and Women) at the American University in Bulgaria

• In Event: Close Encounters: Seeing and Believing after Socialism in Bulgaria and Beyond

Abstract

This paper investigates the founding of the American University in Bulgaria within the framework of alien encounters. In Bulgaria, the changes in 1989 was a hinge moment—a time of futures foreclosed, and new worlds and epistemological systems emerging that was both thrilling and confounding. American professors walked the streets of Blagoevgrad, encountering their students as “missionaries and explorers along the South Sea Islanders” as all involved sought to discover what it meant to be connected to an American University in Bulgaria. How did they come to terms with new understandings of the permissible and impermissible? How did they find their bearings in a world in which all that was sacred was profaned?

Author

• Cristofer Scarboro, King's College