Victor Petrov

Victor Petrov is an Associate Professor of European History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research examines the interplay between global geopolitical forces and local societal transformations, focusing on the Modern Balkans, Eastern Europe, and Cold War dynamics.

He investigates intersections of technology, politics, and culture, particularly how utopian visions in post-socialist contexts clashed with material realities. Current projects include Star Citizens: A Search for Meaning at the Edge of History, analyzing late socialist/post-socialist phenomena like UFO sightings and alternative knowledge systems, and This Sky Of Ours: Interkosmos and the Struggle for A Space Commons, which explores the Eastern Bloc's transnational space cooperation program.

• Books: Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age Behind the Iron Curtain (MIT Press, 2023)

This work was recognized with four major awards, including the Barbara Jelavich Prize and Computer History Museum Prize. His teaching spans modern European history, Cold War studies, histories of computing/technology, and graduate-level historiography courses.