About
About
Dr. Anna S. Antonova is a researcher, project manager, and Change! Fellow and the Principal Investigator for the five-year transdisciplinary research group "Convivial Waterfronts," based at the TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology. Until early 2026, she was director of environmental humanities development at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC) at LMU Munich and Co-I and academic lead for the Bulgarian Black Sea Transition Coastal Laboratory in the Horizon Europe consortium EmpowerUs. Throughout her academic career, she has gained extensive experience with managing diverse and complex projects across research, outreach, and administration, including the design, development, and legal establishment of an interdisciplinary MA program at LMU Munich.
As a researcher, her expertise lies in analyzing societal transformations and environmental governance in the EU using a variety of methods and approaches, including policy analysis, in-depth interviews, living labs, spatial analysis (ArcGIS), Q method, surveys, document and archival research, and knowledge co-production. She has taught methods and research design at the master's level. Additionally, her teaching has spanned various classes in the broad environment and society spectrum, including among others seminars on common property and environmental justice, critical tourism studies, and the MA introductory course to environment and society.
Anna was previously a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellow as part of the ENHANCE ITN network at the University of Leeds, where she wrote her doctoral dissertation conducting fieldwork on the Yorkshire North Sea and Bulgarian Black Sea coastlines.
Chair of Sustainable Urban Environments
TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology
Lead applicant and principal investigator for the 5-year, €1.9 mill. transdisciplinary research group "Convivial Waterfronts: Reimagining Urban Coastal Conservation for Just Sustainability Transformations" (funded by the Volkswagen Foundation)
Project lead, budget management, and team lead for two doctoral students at TUM and three nonacademic teams in Albania (PPNEA), Bulgaria (BBF), and Spain (Salarte)
Advancing cutting-edge co-creative research on urban coastal conservation as a pathway towards societal change across Europe and beyond
Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society
LMU Munich
Project management, budget oversight & team co-lead for the "Strengthening Environmental Humanities" Volkswagen Foundation project (€1 mill.)
Designed, developed & legally established master's program "Environment and Society" at LMU Munich in cooperation with 8 faculties & over 20 departments across the university
Program development, management of strategic partnerships & event planning oversight for the "One Book - Many Worlds: Munich Reads Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh" 2024-2025 initiative, including events with world-renouned author Amitav Ghosh at Literaturhaus München, LMU Munich and Ökologisches Bildungszentrum München
Administrative management of RCC academic contracts (maternity leave replacement of Managing Director January-April 2026)
Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society
LMU Munich
LMU Munich principle investigator and consortium co-investigator for the €6 mill. Horizon Europe consortium project EmpowerUs (coordinated by NRI in Norway)
Team lead for the Bulgarian Transition Coastal Lab in Burgas on the Black Sea coast, responsible for developing & delivering co-productive research
Close collaborative work with the environmental nongovernmental organization Bulgarian Biodiversity Foundation
Lead author for a key peer-reviewed comparative empirical research report across all six Transition Coastal Labs
University of Leeds
Schools of Earth & Environment and English
PhD thesis "Transformations, crises, and contestations in narratives about environment and society on the Yorkshire North Sea and Bulgarian Black Sea coasts", supervised by Dr Fiona Becket (School of English) and Dr Jouni Paavola (School of Earth & Environment).
University of Rhode Island
Department of Marine Affairs
Williams College
English & Maritime Studies (including the Williams-Mystic Maritime Studies Program in Spring 2010)