Suzana Vuljevic (PhD)

Winter Semester 2020/2021

Suzana Vuljevic is a historian of modern Europe and the Balkans spending the winter semester as a visiting fellow in the Field of Excellence. Her research focuses on the nexus between culture and politics, cultural internationalism, peripheral modernisms, and ideas of European and Mediterranean unity. During her time in Graz, she seeks to integrate women writers and thinkers of the region into the intellectual history of Southeast Europe through an examination of the interwar women’s movement. In 1923, representatives from Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Poland set up the Little Entente of Women, which sought to coordinate responses on a number of key issues including women’s suffrage, the protection of children and minorities, the abolition of the death penalty, and education reform. By 1930, the first Balkan conference convened in Athens to evaluate the possibility of forming a Balkan union, calling women activists into the fold. The interwar women’s movement intersected with efforts at greater region-wide integration. Hence, the questions addressed are as follows: how did women build a sense of fellowship that transcended national borders, and on what grounds? Which contemporary debates did women enter into and how? 

"My aim is to retrace the national networks of women’s movements outward toward the circles they collaborated with in neighboring states, especially around social-democratic reform and pacifism."

Vuljevic earned a Ph.D. in History and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Her dissertation reconstructs the transnational networks of a largely forgotten elite group of liberal idealist intellectuals who coalesced around pan-Balkan initiatives in interwar southeast Europe. She is also an emerging literary translator of Albanian and Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian. Her translations of selections of Ervina Halili’s prize-winning collection of poetry titled “Amulet,” have appeared in Balkan Poetry Today. She has translated the work of Ljubomir Micić (1895-1971), founder of Zenithism, an avant-garde movement unique to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. These translations are forthcoming in an anthology of Zenithism.

Brown Bag: Modernism on the Margins: A Transnational Fellowship of Southeast European Women Intellectuals, 1923-1939