To achieve this goal, the series Roma History and Culture publishes books (monographs, edited volumes, and collections of historical sources) from wide range of disciplines – history, ethnography, anthropology, sociology, political science, religion, cultural studies, literature studies, film, and art history, with particular focus on comparative studies – that offer innovative, critical and, above all, reliable and fully documented insights into Roma history and culture that relies on documents, critical rereading and rethinking of historical sources and existing research.

This approach marks a critical turn in the academic studies of Roma history and culture that in the past all too often were blighted by stereotypes and myths, especially the specious belief that there are not enough preserved written sources on the Roma past to allow for the emergence of Roma history as a field in its own right. The series thus, shifts and challenges prevailing academic narratives that Roma are nothing else but a detached, marginalised community and a passive object of different state governments’ policies by presenting, analysing and contextualising the agency of Roma as actors in their own right, with their own views and visions of the development for the Roma and their communities.

In this way the volumes published in the Roma book series present and contribute to the incorporation of the Roma past and present into the mainstream of European and global historiography instead of confining Roma history and culture to some narrow ethnic box. Research work on the Roma from Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe constitutes the very academic focus of the proposed Book Series, which aspires to also cover the past and cultures of other communities that have historically been known under the general label “Gypsies”, such as the Sinti, Manush, Kale, Romanichals, Irish and Scottish Travelers, etc.

The Series starts with the unknown till now manuscript of Roma activist and visionary Shakir Pashov. History of the Gypsies in Bulgaria and Europe: Roma, edited by Elena Marushiakova, Vesselin Popov and Lilyana Kovacheva. It is in Open Access and can be downloaded from: https://brill.com/display/title/63617

The second book in the Series is The Wallachian Gold-Washers. Unlocking the Golden Past of the Rudari Woodworkers by Julieta Rotaru and David Gaunt. It can be downloaded from: https://brill.com/display/title/63620

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