Lilia Topouzova

Lilia Topouzova is a historian and a documentary filmmaker whose interdisciplinary work explores the relationship between remembering and forgetting. She studies and teaches the history and legacy of Eastern European communism, creative nonfiction, oral history, political violence, transitional justice, memory, and gender studies. Her academic research appears in the American Historical Review, Gender & History, Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place, Journal of Visual Literacy, and the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice. Professor Topouzova is the writer of the critically acclaimed documentary The Mosquito Problem & Other Stories, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and TIFF, and received more than twenty-five awards, including the Human Rights Award at the Sarajevo Film Festival in 2007. Her other films include a feature-length documentary on immigration Saturnia (2012), distributed by the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21. She is currently completing her book manuscript, Reclaiming Memory: The History and Legacy of the Bulgarian Gulag and she is production of her third film, Anaanaga: My Mother.

Prof. Topouzova held fellowships at Brown University in the US, York University in Toronto, the Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF) at the University of Potsdam in Germany, and at the Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling in Concordia University in Montreal. Her work has been supported by, among others, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts.