Dr. Nikolay Vukov is an anthropologist and historian, docent at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore with the Ethnographic Museum at the BAS, head of the Anthropology of Verbal Traditions section. He is the author of the thematic issue Food and Nutrition of the journal Bulgarian Ethnology (vol. 1/2010) and of several articles and studies devoted to culinary traditions in a historical and anthropological perspective. Among his more recent publications on food and nutrition is the article Traditional practices and European requirements: incarnations of tradition in regionally marked meat specialties in Bulgaria - Bulgarian folklore, 47, 2, 2017, 187-212. In 2022-2023, he led an international project on the impact of Bulgarian gardeners on the cuisine and social life in Hungary at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.
Assoc. Dr. Nikolay Vukov is a researcher at IEFEM-BAS and a part-time teacher of cultural and social anthropology at Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski; and Plovdiv University Paisiy Hilendarski. He defended his doctoral studies in folklore studies (2002 – Institute of Folklore, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) and in modern history (2005 – Central European University in Budapest). He has specialized in a number of universities and research centers abroad, including the College for Higher Studies in Berlin, the Museum of Human Sciences in Paris, the American Research Institute in Istanbul, the New Europe College in Bucharest, the Karl Franzens University in Graz and etc. Guest lecturer at the universities La Sapienza - Rome, Kadir Has - Istanbul, University of the Aegean - Mytilene, Fernando Pessoa - Porto, European University - Tirana, and Dante Alighieri- Reggio Calabria. He is a leader and participant in numerous research projects in Bulgaria and abroad, including as a coordinator from the Bulgarian side of projects under the Culture and Creative Europe; programs of the EU. UNESCO Certified Expert in the Protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Prof. Nikolay Vukov's scientific interests are related to the anthropology of memory and commemorations; monuments, commemorations and museum representations; intangible cultural heritage; anthropology of kinship and family; folk epic and verbal folklore; borders and migrant communities; institutions and cultural heritage of the Bulgarian communities abroad. He is the author of the monograph Family relations in the Bulgarian heroic epic (Sofia: Academic Publishing House "Prof. Marin Drinov", 2008, second edition 2022) and more than 100 articles and studies in collections and magazines in Bulgaria and abroad. He is the co-author of the collective monographs Cultural heritage in migration. Models of consolidation and institutionalization of Bulgarian communities abroad (2017), and Migration, Memory, Heritage: Socio-Cultural Approaches to the Bulgarian-Turkish Border (2012), as well as two albums - Communism of Stone. Monuments in Bulgaria, 1944-1989, and Witnesses of Stone: Monuments and Architecture of the Red Bulgaria (2011). He participated as a compiler and editor in the preparation of the following collections: Europe and the Orient: Past Encounters, Heritage, Present-Day Interactions (2022) Verbosity – traditions – folklore. Volume 1 (2022); Heroic Art and Socialist Realism: Monuments, Memory and Representations of the Socialist Past after 1989 (2018), Cultural Heritage in Migration (2017), Zmey, zmeitsa, llama, hala. Collection of folklore texts (2016); The Museum Beyond the Nation (2016), and Migrations on Both Sides of the Bulgarian-Turkish Border: Legacies, Identities, Intercultural Interactions (2012).