Lilia Topouzova
Lilia Topouzova is an Associate Professor of History and Creative Nonfiction at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information & Technology (ICCIT) at the University of Toronto Mississauga and holds Graduate Appointments in the Department of History & the Centre for European and Eurasian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.
Her interdisciplinary practice is defined by a critical engagement with historical sources and a commitment to give a public dimension to scholarly research through film, media art and creative nonfiction. Situated at the intersection of history and memory, her work explores political violence, silence, trauma, and public remembrance.
Topouzova’s scholarship investigates the history and afterlife of state repression in post-communist societies through archival research and oral history interviews. She is the author of Unsilencing: The History & Legacy of the Bulgarian Gulag (Cornell, 2025). Her articles and essays have appeared the American Historical Review, Gender & History, (awarded the 2018 Souyz Outstanding Article Prize) The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place, Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice, Journal of Visual Literacy, Critique & Humanism, and The European Review of Books.
Her collaborative media installation, The Neighbours, developed with artist-scholars Krasimira Butseva and Julian Chehirian, was selected to represent Bulgaria at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024). The installation has been recognized as one of top pavilions of the Biennale by The Guardian, Artforum, ArtReview, Frieze, The Financial Times, The Art Newspaper, and others. In September 2023, a Toronto-based edition of The Neighbours, staged in collaboration with Soulpepper Theatre and the Jackman Humanities Institute, received the 2024 Heritage Toronto People’s Choice Award.
You can read more about her work in this Guardian feature: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/31/bulgaria-gulag-installatio... & listen to the CBC Ideas radio documentary Voices of a Silenced History: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16155198-voices-sil...
Topouzova is also the scriptwriter of the documentary films The Mosquito Problem & Other Stories (2007) and Saturnia (2012), which she also co-directed. Her films have premiered at TIFF and the Cannes International Film Festival, received numerous awards–including the 2007 Human Rights Award at the Sarajevo Film Festival–and have been reviewed in the NY Times, The Guardian, The Toronto Star, The Globe & Mail, and Varsity.
Her scholarship and creative projects have been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Jackman Humanities Institute, and international residencies. She has held fellowships at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF) in Germany (2013), Brown University (2014), York University (2015), the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University (2017), the Centre for Advanced Study in Sofia (2022), and the Leibniz ScienceCampus at the University of Regensburg (2024). She currently serves as an Associate Editor of East European Politics and Societies.
