Maria Todorova is Professor of History at the The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Her ground-breaking work published twenty years ago, Imagining the Balkans deals with the region’s inconsistent (but usually negative) image inside Western culture, as well as with the paradoxes of cultural reference and its assumptions. In this book Todorova develops a theory of Balkanism as a region geographically inextricable from Europe, yet culturally constructed as “the other” that has often served as a repository of negative characteristics upon which a positive and self-congratulatory image of the “European” has been built. With this work, Maria Todorova offers a timely, accessible study of how an innocent geographic appellation was transformed into one of the most powerful and widespread pejorative designations in modern history.