Daniela S. Hristova In Memoriam

Abstract

It is with an enormous sense of loss that we reflect on the untimely death of Daniela S. Hristova on October 10, 2010. Daniela passed away after an extremely brief battle with cancer, at the age of 48. At the time of her death, Daniela was employed as a Temporary Lecturer in the Department of Slavonic Languages at the University of Cambridge. She was visiting her native Bulgaria, on her way from her home in Chicago back to England, and died shortly after being diagnosed. Daniela's sudden death was a great shock to all who knew her. Daniela was born on September 5, 1962, in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria. She completed her B.A. and M.A. degrees at the University of Sofia, and also studied Slavic Philology in Prague before moving to Chicago with her husband Vladimir Tchernev and their son Ivo. Daniela did her subsequent graduate work at the University of Chicago, working under the directorship of Bill Darden and defending her doctoral dissertation in 2002 on Grammatical function and syntactic structure: The participles in the Kievan Chronicle. She was then hired to teach in Chicago's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, where she remained for five years. During her Chicago period, Daniela also developed close ties with the Slavic Department at Harvard. As a graduate student, she had participated in the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute program in the summer of 1999. She then spent 1999-2000 as a visiting scholar, taking advanced Slavic linguistics courses with Michael Flier and pursuing her doctoral research on historical East Slavic syntax. Daniela also spent 2005-06 at Harvard, having been awarded a Eugene and Daymel Shklar fellowship for the fall to conduct research at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and teaching graduate courses in the spring of 2006. In the fall of 2008 she accepted a position at Cambridge, teaching courses in historical Slavic linguistics. Daniela pursued a variety of professional activities as a developing scholar. In 1999 her first English publication appeared in these very pages (JSL 7(2): 171-78). This was a Reflections piece entitled Total Fears, in honor of her favorite Czech author Bohumil Hrabal and which described the unusual combination of challenges facing a returning woman graduate student and Bulgarian emigre. Around that time she also launched a publishing venture called the Aleko Society (Obstestvo Aleko', in honor of a much earlier Bulgarian with a Chicago connection, Aleko Konstantinov), which published translated collections by award-winning poet Mark Strand, then at the University of Chicago. Another scholarly venture to which Daniela was dedicated was the Norwegian Landslide of the Norm project, which studies interrelations between linguistic liberalization and literary development in Russia during the post-Revolutionary years of the 1920s and the post-Soviet period of the 1990s. …