The Balkan Circle is a weekly seminar where lectures, presentations, exhibits, or open interactive dialogues will focus on any (and all) aspects of historical, political, economic, social and cultural phenomena in the (so-called) Balkans. The seminar is free and open to the public and will be held every Friday during the semester from 12:00 pm to 1:15 pm.

We are very pleased that our online format led to greater engagement from the international community. Keeping this in mind, we've decided to continue our online presentations rather than regroup in our tiny second-floor conference room (as charming as it is). We will have occasional "in-person" speakers, but they will also be live-streamed to the international audience to allow for continued participation among The Circle.

Register for the Fall '21 Series

(You only need to register once for all the meetings.)

Fall 2021 Schedule

September 3 • Vasiliki Neofotistos
Remembering the Past, Constructing the Present: History and Albanian Identity in North Macedonia

September 10 • Jovo Miladinovic
The Political and The Material: Ottoman-Habsburg Dispute over the Menschenmaterial in the post-Ottoman territories of the Kingdom of Serbia and Montenegro (1916-1917)

September 17 • Raul Carstocea
Imagining the Global Fascist Revolution in a Balkan Periphery: The Legionary Movement in Interwar Romania

September 24 • Keith Wagner
Mimicking the Metropolis: Parisianization as a Path to Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Bucharest

October 1 • Enriketa Papa-Pandelejmoni
Legitimization vs. Delegitimization of Terror: Controversies on Transitional Justice and Communist Past in Albania

October 8 • Dominique Kirchner Reill
The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire

October 15 • Theodora Dragostinova 
The Cold War from the Margins: A Small Socialist State on the Global Cultural Scene

October 22 • Nuri Tahir
The Impact of European Integration on the Rights of Minorities in Bulgaria and in Greece

October 29 • Jason Roberts
Between Evola and Dugin: Traditionalism in a Romanian Iron Guard Manifesto

November 5 • Vladimir Kulić
Exhibiting Yugoslavia

November 12 • Kiril Avramov
Raiders of the Past: Revisiting Department XIV of the First Main Directorate of Bulgarian State Security's Controversial Legacy

December 3 • Dan Draghia
A Contentious Politics Perspective on the Romanian Workers Movement at the beginning of the 20th Century (1905-1921)

Past Speakers:

Keith Brown • The 1903 Report: Macedonia, Patriotic Education and the Case for Dialogue

Caterina Preda • Communist Monuments in Post-Socialist South-Eastern Europe: Removed, Dislocated or Resignified

Iskren Ivanov • Radicalization in Bulgaria: Empirical Research on U.S. – Russia Competition in Eastern Europe 

Isa Blumi • An Ottoman Story Until the End: Reading Fan Noli’s  Post-Mediterranean Struggle in America, 1906-1922 

Bojana Videkanic • Nonaligned Modernism: Tracing Transnational Artistic Ties Between Second and Third Worlds

Diana Mishkova • The Production of Space: A Balkan Perspective

Samantha Farmer • Reparative Tendencies in the Work of Jasna Žmak and Dana Budisavljević

Smoki Musaraj • Book Talk: Tales from Albarado: Ponzi Logics of Accumulation in Postsocialist Albania

Emily Greble • Islamic Revivalism in Yugoslavia and the Crisis of Europe

Jason Roberts • The Iron Guard Ecclesiology of Nae Ionescu and Mircea Eliade

Mary Neuburger • By Bread Alone? Hunger, Abundance, and the Politics of Grain in 20^th Century Bulgaria 

Dimitar Bechev • Rival Power: Russia's Challenge to the West in the Balkans

Ruslan Trad • Under the Radar: Hezbollah on the Balkans

Vladislav Beronja • Fragments of Utopia: Imaginary Archives in Dubravka Ugrešić’s Fiction

Jeremy Kasper • Kosovo: U.S. Bureaucracies Adaptation to Conduct Post-Combat Operations in a Dynamic Multi-National Environment

Maša Kolanović • New Moral and Affective Economy of Capitalism on the Ruins of Yugoslav Socialism: Three Cultural Patterns

Stefka Kuneva • Residential-Defensive Towers in the Balkans from the Ottoman Era

Michael Kiel • Report from internship at the Balkan Civil Society Development Network in Skopje

Charalampos Minasidis • "Come See Swords and Yatagans / and Quite a Few Bulgarian Heads": Constructing a Greek anti-Bulgarian Culture of War during the War Decade of 1912-22

Milena Ðorđević-Kisačanin • Returning "Home": Bosniak Migrants in Turkey

Jasmin Mujanovic • De Facto End of European Enlargement in the WB and the Effects of that on Regional and Continental Politics

Nita Luci • Kosovo’s Promise of Coal and Future of Efficiency: Gendered Imaginaries of Energy

Sunnie Rucker-Chang • Roma Representation in Southeast European Cinema