Prof. Dr. Florentina Badalanova Geller

Florentina Badalanova Geller is Guest Professor at the Excellence Cluster Topoi; she completed her BA and MA in Slavonic Philology at the University of Sofia in 1979. After spending a year at Warsaw University (1978-1979), she move to the Moscow State University, where she completed her PhD in 1984 (Philology); she received her Habilitation in 1993. Her academic profile was much influenced by the Moscow-Tartu Semiotic School (working in close collaboration with Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky), Ethno-linguistics (conducting field-work with Nikita Tolstoi) and epistemological principles of the Moscow-Petersburg circle of Structuralist-Folklorists (Eleazar Meletinskii, Sergei Nekliudov and Elena Novik). She worked as Research Fellow and Senior Fellow in the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Folklore (1985-1994), also appointed as Associate Professor of Anthropology (with tenure) at the University of Sofia (1992-1994). She conducted extensive anthropological, folklore and ethno-linguistic field research in Europe and Asia. She came to the University of London in 1994 as British Council Lector, teaching at UCL for 10 years. Since 2004 she has a permanent position at the Royal Anthropological Institute (London), in charge of the Slavonic database for the Anthropological Index Online. She is Honorary Research Associate (UCL), and a member of the Advisory Board of the World Oral Literature Project (Cambridge University), as well as the Editorial Board of Circumscribere: Journal for the History of Science. She was also Specialist Advisor to the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise in the UK (Sub-panel 42: Anthropology). She has held research fellowships from the Modern Humanities Research Association (UK), British Academy and MPIWG. She was also the recipient of research funding from the Cotton Foundation and the Higher Education Funding Council of England.

Her forthcoming publications include The Folk Bible (forthcoming, Brill) and Unholy Scriptures (Brill).

Activities