Elitza Stanoeva holds PhD in History (TU Berlin) and is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. She has been Visiting Fellow in Berlin, Leipzig, Konstanz, Potsdam, Vienna, Florence and Sofia as well as Research Associate in the ERC project PanEur1970s at the European University Institute in Florence. She is author of the monograph Sofia: Ideology, Urban Planning and Life under Socialism (in Bulgarian) and many articles in Bulgarian, English and German.

CONDEM analyzes the debates on the architectural heritage of the recent denounced past after regime change when such landmarks become a target of political campaigns of obliterating the past and its marks in urban space. Alongside political actors who appropriate heritage in their memory politics, architects engage with this problem motivated by ‘politics of professionalization’, that is a pursuit for expert agency and public recognition. CONDEM focuses on Sofia and Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s two largest cities, and three periods of political transformation: nation-state building after 1878, state socialism after World War II and the “transition” after 1989.