PhD candidate Sarah Craycraft has been awarded a Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme Graduate Team Fellowship for the year 2021-2022, with the theme of extinction/imagination.  Sarah will be finishing her dissertation on young Bulgarians’ reimagination of the village and village life as a means of stemming outmigration. For a generation whose affective attachments to villages are linked to summer vacation, freedom, and play rather than agricultural work, the imaginary recuperation of the village fuels various cultural conservation and heritage projects. Furthering this irony at the center of the cultural rescue project is the fact that the folklore that now represents the national past originated as an imaginary construction of an earlier socialist state. Sarah’s work focuses on the generational memory of young people born after socialism and on the special relation that develops between the very young and the very old in the absence of parents. The Bulgarian case resonates with projects aimed at recuperating the rural in other times and places across Eastern Europe and the world.

Congratulations Sarah!!