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 • Vlad Beronja
Revisiting Balkan Blues: Imperial Peripheries, Decolonial Culture, and the Melancholia of the “Yugoslav Race”
November 5 • Vladimir Kulić
Exhibiting Yugoslavia
November 12 • Lyubomir Pozharliev
The Road to Socialism : The Vicious Circle of Highway Building and Infrastructure in Postwar Bulgaria (1945-1989)
December 3 • Dan Draghia
A Contentious Politics Perspective on the Romanian Workers Movement at the beginning of the 20th Century (1905-1921)
Past Speakers:
Note: Recordings of the past presentors are available on our YouTube Channel. Some recordings are unavailable due to speaker request or technical glitches.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 20th 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
