International and domestic cooperation
Strengthening Southeast European Studies also means making the study of the region attractive for future generations of students. We put ‘Europe’ at the centre: students will experience an enlarged and still enlarging Europe in the making, following courses offered by us and our partners, and studying together with students from the region.
We will internationalise our teaching, using online teaching platforms that will allow project partners to share their courses. This will create greater choice in the topics students can study. We plan to formalise these online learning imports in Regensburg, in the hope that partner universities will follow. A pilot with the University of Rijeka will start in 2023, which will be rolled out to other partners in the next stage. Our strengths are in the humanities – history, linguistics and social anthropology – while our partner universities may add other relevant subjects in political science, economy, or sociology. Formal teaching agreements could be reached with multiple partner universities (to be shared across the online teaching platform).
We will contribute to an Area Studies extension module for students of all Area Studies programmes on offer in Regensburg, in which conceptual and methodological problems relevant to Area Studies will be analysed. We will coordinate this with the new Department for Interdisciplinary and Multi-scalar Area Studies (DIMAS). The student-led seeFField Blog will offer students the opportunity to develop media and communication skills, making them reflect on the relevance of their acquired knowledge, and instilling in them an ethos of public engagement and knowledge transfer.
From the Summer Term 2023 onwards, we will offer instruction of the Albanian language at beginner and advanced level, adding it to our list of Southeast European languages taught. Although Albanian is on a par with other languages spoken in the region – with six million speakers spread across four Balkan states and 1,5 million living in the diaspora – it is poorly represented in German universities. Apart from being one of the oldest Balkan languages incorporated into the Balkan ‘Sprachbund’, Albanian-inhabited areas of the region are at the centre of numerous global entanglements, providing us with opportunities to explore various translocal and transregional connections. seeFField will reinvigorate ‘Albanian Studies’ – a minor subject in and of itself – as part of Southeast European Studies.
Lecturers from the region
Dr Zora Kostadinova
Teaching Assistant at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at UCL
Seminar “Islam in Southeastern Europe”, summer term 2024
Dr Zora Kostadinova holds a PhD in Social Anthropology and an MA in Southeast European Studies from University College London. Her dissertation titled “Becoming a Good Person: Islam, the Self and the Ethical Imagination among Naqshbandi Muslims in Postwar Sarajevo” examines the relationship between religious subjectivities, historical temporalities, critical events, and ethics.
Her research interests are in the revitalization of Sufi practices in Southeast Europe, Muslim subjectivities, and intergenerational transmission of Islamic knowledge. She is currently a Teaching Assistant at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at UCL, and a Research Associate at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales; EHESS on the French Agency funded project, Red Gold.
Dr Miroslav Pavlović
Associate professor of Modern history at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia
Seminar “The Balkans under Ottoman rule”, winter term 2023/24
In 2016, he finished his PhD in history under the supervision of Prof. Aleksandar Fotić, with the disertation titled Military Administrative Organization of the Sanjak of Semendire 1739–1788. (formerly known as The Pashalık of Belgrade). Author of two books: Sanjak of Semendire 1739–1788 (2017, in Serbian) and On the Frontier of Islam: The World of an Ottoman European Province in the 18th Century (2023, in Serbian). He received the Ilarion Ruvarac Reward for the best historiographical work in Serbia for 2017.
His main areas of research are history of the Balkans under the Ottoman rule, and Ottoman local elites during transitional period. He has participated in various international scientific projects and university cooperations in Europe and USA. He is a member of various historical associations (European Association for American Studies, etc.), national institutions (Matica srpska), scientific and editorial bords.
Dr Slavka Karakusheva
Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski
Seminar “Imperial Legacies in the Balkans”, winter term 2023/24
Slavka Karakusheva has earned her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski. She was recently awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Sofia (2022-2023). Slavka has specialized at esteemed institutions including the British Institute at Ankara (2023), The Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz (2019), The Department of New Media at Kadir Has University (2016), and The Cultural Politics and Management Research Centre at Istanbul Bilgi University (2014-2015), among others.
Her research spans various collective projects exploring themes such as gender policies towards Muslim minorities in Eastern Europe, Ottoman heritage with a focus on public bathhouses, and migration practices in the Balkans. Her current academic pursuits delve into nation-building politics, migration dynamics, and identity construction within Bulgaria’s Turkish and Muslim communities, as well as minority cultural memory and heritage.
Articles on the topic
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Having claimed more than 22,000 casualties, the memory of the Homeland War still looms large in the social and political landscape almost 25 years later. One issue of particular concern has to do with the branitelji, or ‘defenders’ – those citizens who are officially recognised as having fought for the Croatian armed forces in that conflict.
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Globale Verständigung ist ein Kunststück – vor allem dann, wenn Wörter zwar gleich aussehen, aber in jeder Region ihre eigene Bedeutung haben. So meinen die politischen Begriffe Rechts und Links in Lateinamerika nicht dasselbe wie in Südosteuropa. Die Missverständnisse, die sich daraus ergeben, haben historische Ursachen, die bis in die Kolonialzeit zurückgehen...
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Historians of corruption claim that, although direct lessons cannot be derived from the past, the phenomenon of corruption can be better understood if we study it historically. On the one hand, today's activities regarded as corrupt were not specific to countries seen as corrupt. On the other hand, successful anticorruption is a historical, protracted process determined by a multitude of factors in a particular historical configuration.
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read articleFrom Post-Conflict Stability to Post-Conflict Degradation: The Consequences of the European Union’s Liberal Peacebuilding Approach in Kosovo
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read articleThe Belgrade Waterfront: Creation of the city of the future?
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