Ivelina Masheva

Ivelina Masheva (PhD) is an assistant professor at the Institute for Historical Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. She earned her doctorate in 2015 at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” with a dissertation on Ottoman commercial law reforms and their impact on the business activities of Bulgarian merchants. Since 2020, Masheva has been part of the ERC-funded project ZARAH: Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Transnationally, from the Age of Empires to the Late 20th Century, where she researches the relationship between women and trade unions in Bulgaria and internationally from the late 19th to the late 20th century. Her research interests include legal history, women’s and gender history, and labour history in Bulgaria and Southeast Europe.

Selected publications:

• Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Beyond: A new transnational history. London: UCL Press, 2025 (co-authored with Selin Çağatay, Mátyás Erdélyi, Alexandra Ghit, Olga Gnydiuk, Veronika Helfert, Zhanna Popova, Jelena Tešija, Eszter Varsa, and Susan Zimmermann);
• “Renegotiating Skills, Wages and the Right to Work: On the Gender of Labour Activism around Rationalization in the Bulgarian Tobacco Industry in the Early 1930s”, International Labor and Working-Class History 105 (2024): 213–30.
• “Ottoman Merchants, Provincial Elites, and the Introduction of Modern Commercial Litigation in the Ottoman Balkans (1840–50s)”, In: Transforming Southeast Europe During the Long Nineteenth Century: Persons and Personalities as Agents of Modernization in the Ottoman and the Post-Ottoman Space, edited by Boriana Antonova-Goleva and Ivelina Masheva, 271–294. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2024.
• “Women’s Labour Struggles in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond: Towards a Long-Term, Transregional, Integrative, and Critical Approach” In Through the Prism of Gender and Work: Women’s Labour Struggles in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th and 20th Centuries, edited by Selin Çağatay, Alexandra Ghit, Olga Gnydiuk, Veronika Helfert, Ivelina Masheva, Zhanna Popova, Jelena Tešija, Eszter Varsa, and Susan Zimmermann. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2024, pp. 1–80 (co-authored with Selin Çağatay, Mátyás Erdélyi, Alexandra Ghit, Olga Gnydiuk, Veronika Helfert, Zhanna Popova, Jelena Tešija, Eszter Varsa, and Susan Zimmermann).