Maria Todorova is the Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor of History and Center of Advanced Study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She teaches and researches the history of Eastern Europe, in particular the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire in the modern period. Prof. Todorova has authored numerous monographs, edited volumes, and collections of essays, as well as some 140 articles on social and cultural history, historical demography, and historiography. Her seminal book, Imagining the Balkans (1997), reinvigorated the field of Balkan/Southeast European studies and continues to provide the paradigm for the field. Imagining the Balkans has been translated into 13 languages and is in its second edition. Her work has influenced not only historians but anthropologists, sociologists, and generally everyone working on the region. She is also the co-editor of Postcommunist nostalgia (with Zsuzsa Gille), New York: Berghahn Publishers, 2010 (paperback edition 2012) and Remembering Communism: Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experience in Southeast Europe (with Augusta Dimou and Stefan Troebst), Budapest, New York: Central European University Press, 2014.