A great man is one who collects knowledge the way a bee collects honey and uses it to help people overcome the difficulties they endure - hunger, ignorance and disease!
- Nikola Tesla

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
- Franklin Roosevelt

While their territory has been devastated and their homes despoiled, the spirit of the Serbian people has not been broken.
- Woodrow Wilson

Tatjana Aleksic

Tatjana Aleksic received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University in 2007 and has been teaching at the University of Michigan since 2007. She is the editor of Mythistory and Narratives of the Nation in the Balkans (2007). Additional publications include articles on nationalism, gender, language, and myth and translations into Serbian of short fiction, haiku, and medical textbooks.  She is the recipient of research awards from the University of Michigan (2008), Serbian Ministry for the Diaspora (2008), and a Rutgers University Dean’s fellowship (2002-2004).

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She is active in National Association for Slavic Studies, the American Comparative Literature Association, and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Ongoing projects include a book manuscript on sacrifice, the body, and the nation.  Teaching interests in Comparative Literature include undergraduate courses on twentieth-century culture and history, women and myth, and graduate seminars on nationalism, and poststructuralist theory.

Languages:

  • Serbo-Croatian (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, native), working knowledge of French, Italian, Latin, Modern Greek.

Affiliation(s):

  • Comparative Literature, CREES, Slavic Languages & Literatures

Fields of Study:

  • Literary Theory
  • Postmodern Fiction
  • Contemporary Balkan literature, with an emphasis on Serbian and Modern Greek fiction
  • Balkan Film
  • Myth, History, and Memory
  • Nationalism
  • Postcolonialism
  • Exile
  • Issues of Identity
  • Gender Issues
  • Music

Select Publications:

  • Mythistory and Narratives of the Nation in the Balkans, ed. Tatjana Aleksic (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007)
  • “Making Patriarchal History Women’s Own: Eugenia Fakinou’s The Seventh Garment.” Forthcoming in Sanja Bahun-Radunovic and Julie Rajan, eds., Myth and Violence in Contemporary Female Text: New Cassandras, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010.
  • “Southeast European Novel,” Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel,  ed. Peter Logan, 2010.
  • “National Definition through Postmodern Fragmentation: Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars,” Slavic and East European Journal (SEEJ) 53:1 (Spring 2009): 86-104.
  • “The Emerging Subject of Rhea Galanaki’s Ismail Ferik Pasha,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 27:1 (May 2009): 31-54.
  • “Grief Can only Be Written in One’s Mother Tongue.” Literature of Exile, ed. Agnieszka Gutty (New York, Berlin: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009) 155-175.
  • “Disintegrating Narratives and Nostalgia in Post-Yugoslav Postmodern Fiction.” Balkan Literatures in the Era of Nationalism, Murat Belge, Jale Parla, eds. Istanbul, Turkey: Bilgi University Press, 2009, 3-14.
  • “Extricating the Self from History: Bait by David Albahari.” MMLA Journal 39:2 (Fall 2006): 54-70.
  • Review of Lorraine Mortimer, Terror and Joy: The Films of Dušan Makavejev in The Slavic Review (Summer, 2010).
  • Review of Danilo Kiš, Mansarda, tr. John Cox in World Literature Today (March/April 2009): 68-9.
  • Review of Dubravka Ugrešic, Lend Me Your Character, tr. Celia Hawkesworth and Michael Henry Heim in Balkanistica 20, (Spring 2007): 185-187.

Education:

  • 2002 MA in English Literature and Theory, University Of Nis, Serbia
  • 2007 Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Rutgers University

Book:

  • (2013) The Sacrificed Body

From: Slavic Languages & Literatures


SA

 

People Directory

Andrej Grubačić

Andrej Grubačić is a visionary intellectual, professor, activist and fellow traveler of Zapatista-inspired direct action movements. Currently, Grubačić serves as professor and Chair of the Anthropology and Social Change Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He started his academic career as a historian of 16th century world at the University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, for reasons that were both political and intellectual, he left the country, and reinvented himself as a radical historian and sociologist.

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Read more ...

Publishing

The Meaning of Reality

Essays on Existence and Communion, Eros and History

by Christos Yannaras

The collection of articles traces the thought of Christos Yanaras through his long journey in discovering the meaning of existence, communion, eros, and history. It is a cause of immense joy that no fewer than twenty articles of passionate significance and substance have at present been gathered together in this volume under the title The Meaning of Reality.

Yannaras is undoubtedly one of the most significant thinkers of our time. Kallistos Ware once described him as "the most creative and prophetic religious thinker at work in Greece today," while Rowan Williams characterizes him as "one of the most significant Christian philosophers in Europe." His very wide and no less deep education helps him to develop an inimitable blend of philosophy, theology, and social criticism, and to speak in an original way about the traditional and contemporary issues of human existence, as well as the latest challenges of modern empirical science and political engagement. A detailed knowledge of the writings of the Holy Fathers has always been his foundation amidst the labyrinth of modern thought - which is inimately bound up with psychoanalysis, environmental issues, human rights, postmodernism, and pluralism , to mention just a few. Insistence on the primacy, uniqueness, and eternal value of human personality prevails in almost all his works and inspires his own vigorous theological and ecumenical engagement, based on the Orthodox eucharistic and ascetic tradition.