Assoc. Prof. Antoaneta Doncheva, D.Sc., is an associate professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and History of Plovdiv University "Paisii Hilendarski," in the Department of Sociology of Law, Economics and Innovations. She has taught courses at Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski" and New Bulgarian University. She was an Erasmus lecturer at the University of Cologne (2013) and has specialized in Bari, Italy. She is a co-founder of Philosophia – e-journal for philosophy & culture and a member of its editorial board. She is also a member of the Semiotic Society of America and the East European Center for Semiotic Studies.
Her main research interests are in the fields of semiotics and the philosophy of art. She has published in Bulgaria, Austria, Italy, the USA, and China.
She is the author of the books The Mask – Freedom and Prison: The Problem of Identity in the Work of Luigi Pirandello (Sofia: Iztok-Zapad, 2007), The Self and the Other in 20th Century Western European Culture (Sofia: Iztok-Zapad, 2014), and Samuel Beckett: The Luminous Absence (Sofia: Iztok-Zapad, 2022).
The Mask – Freedom and Prison is the first monograph by a Bulgarian author on the work of Pirandello, who revolutionized the fundamental principles of theater. The main theme explores Pirandello’s establishment and tracking of the collapse of personal identity, along with the compensatory ideologies aimed at its secondary construction.
The Self and the Other expands on this theme through a panoramic historical study of the structuring of personal identity and the manifestation of its crises in the 20th century by examining emblematic works and authorial programs.
Samuel Beckett: The Luminous Absence interprets social and personal entropy, the problems of the Self, and prosthetic identity in and through the work of one of the undeniably greatest authors of the 20th century. This is the first monograph on Samuel Beckett in Bulgarian academic culture. It won the first prize for humanities from Portal Kultura in 2023.
Naked is her first novel.
