Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena

Professor Ana Dević

Professor Ana Dević

January - December 2016
Mail ana.devic@unibo.it

Currently, Anna Dević is professor at the Sociology Department of Fatih University, and from 2011 till 2012 she was with the Political Science Department of Doğus University. Since 2007 till present, she has also been an Adjunct Professor at the University of Bologna Department of Political Science. Between 2007 and 2009 she worked as a Lecturer at the University of Glasgow Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and from 2002 till 2006 as an Associate Professor in Political Sociology at the University of Aarhus. Prior to her Research Fellowship at the University of Bonn Centre for Development Research (2001-2002), she had a two-year postdoctoral fellowship with the Brown University Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. She hold a PhD in Sociology from the University of California at San Diego, a MA in Development Studies from the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague (University of Rotterdam), and a B.A. in Economics from the University of Novi Sad in SFR Yugoslavia. In 2015 and 2014 she received Erasmus Mundus Visiting Professor grants for spending 2-8 weeks at the University of Oviedo (GEMMA-Gender Studies MA), University of Glasgow (International Master in Russian, Central and East European Studies), and University of Perpigan (Crossways in Narratives MA).

Research project at the Kolleg

Social Inequalities, Powerlessness and Discontent in Late Socialist Yugoslavia: Contesting Methodological Nationalism
This research, a monograph in preparation for publication, focuses on the debates over the definitions of the political and economic crisis that were at the center of academic and political interests in the late socialist Yugoslavia. The project aims to reconstruct the main points of discussions about the causes and solutions of the deepening social inequalities, high unemployment and the growing dependency from international financial institutions that were recognized as threats to the socialist course of development in, both, the official Party discourse and the critical academic scholarship between the mid-1970s and until the violent ending of the country. To retrieve the lines of the local debates about "What went wrong with Yugoslav socialism" will shed a new light on the eve of the country's collapse, which is different from the standard ethnic/ nationality conflict emphasis. The rich corpus of the social scientists' debates and the polemics between them and the League of Communists' forums throughout the 1970s and early 1990s, along with the then new political perspectives in the sphere of popular culture and civil society forums, has been still largely neglected in the approaches to Yugoslavia's breakdown. The result of this 'amnesia' had been the prevalence of the nationalist method in exploring the causes and course of the violent breakdown of Yugoslavia.

Main areas of research

  • Nationalism and Antinationalism
  • Intellectuals and Knowledge (comparative history of)
  • Instrumentalizations of Ethnicity, Religion, and Democracy
  • Socialist Yugoslavia and Post-Yugoslav states
  • USSR and Post-Soviet Region
  • Western Intervention and Aid to Democracy in Postsocialist States
  • Cinema as Method of Conflict Analysis
  • Gender and Feminism
  • Social Movements in (Post-) Socialism and Turkey

Positions and memberships

  • 2009 to present, Editorial Board Member, PECOB (Portal on Central-Eastern and Balkan Europe, University of Bologna) book and paper publishing
  • 2002-2010, Program Board Member, Interdisciplinary Gender Studies Program, University of Novi Sad
  • Association for the Study of Nationalities
  • International Studies Association 
  • Italian Association for Middle Eastern Studies

Edited volumes

Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Democracy (Bonn: European Integration Series, 2003).

Articles

'What Nationalism Has Buried: Powerlessness, Culture, and Discontent in Late Yugoslav Socialism,' forthcoming in Social Inequalities and Discontent in Yugoslav Socialism, edited by Paul Stubbs, Igor Duda and Rory Archer (Aldershot and London: Ashgate, 2016).
'The Incentives and Actors of Protests in Turkey and Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2013,' with Marija Krstic, in 'Everywhere Taksim': Sowing the Seeds for a New Turkey at Gezi, edited by Isabel David and Kumru F. Toktamış (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 59-73.

'Jaws of the Nation and Weak Embraces of the State: The Lines of Division, Indifference and Loyalty in Bosnia-Herzegovina,' in Strategies of Symbolic Nation-building in South Eastern Europe, edited by Pål Kolstø (Oxford: Ashgate, 2014), 51-86.

'Fringe Antinationalisms: Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony in Cinema,' in Towards Open Regionalism in South East Europe, edited by Paul Stubbs and Christophe Solioz (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2012), 191-209.

'Re-digging the Graves: Political Mythologization of the Dead in Yugoslavia and Its Successor States,' in Political Myths in Former Yugoslavia and Successor States: A Shared Narrative, edited by Vjekoslav Perica and Darko Gavrilovic (Amsterdam: The Republic of Letters, 2011), 76-85.

'Exports of Peace and Multiculturalism to Nation-Building Sites,' in Transnationalism in the Balkans, edited by Denisa Kostovicova and Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic (Oxford: Routledge, 2008), 41-58.

'Civil Society in the Focus of Foreign Aid in Kosovo,' Ethnopolitics 5, no.3 (2006): 257-273.

Reviews

Review of the cinema of Želimir Žilnik: '' Fortress Europe': The Schengen Human Burden,' in Nationalities Papers 31, no. 3 (2003): 379-381.

Diverging Attempts at Facing the Recent Past: War, Guilt and Responsibility: The Case Of Serbia, Global Security and Cooperation Quarterly, 8, Spring 2003.