I am a historian interested in politics and cultures of memory. I am currently based at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna. My research interests include memory studies, the history of Yugoslavia and global Cold War history.
My first book on the politics of Second World War memory in Serbia was published with Routledge in 2020.
My research project, funded through the APART-GSK program of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, investigates Yugoslav socialist internationalism. I examine the role of the memory and legacies of war in the relations between the Yugoslav Partisan veterans and anti-colonial liberation movements from Africa.
Globalising the Yugoslav Revolution in the Postcolonial World
Veterans, Memory and Transnational Networks of Solidarity
Photo: Yugoslav Partisan and journalist Zdravko Pečar with the FLN soldiers during the Algerian War of Independence, 1958
© Museum of African Art, Belgrade
How do the politics of memory work?
Since the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević in 2000, memory politics in Serbia has undergone drastic changes in the way in which the Second World War and its aftermath is understood and interpreted. The glorification and romanticisation of the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland, more commonly referred to as the Chetnik movement, has become the central theme of Serbia’s memory politics during this period. The book traces their construction as a national antifascist movement equal to the communist-led Partisans and as victims of communism, showing the parallel justification and denial of their collaboration and mass atrocities. The multifaceted approach of this book combines a diachronic perspective that illuminates the continuities and ruptures of narratives, actors and practices, with in-depth analysis of contemporary Serbia, rooted in ethnographic fieldwork and exploring multiple levels of memory work.
“Jelena Đureinović’s timely book is an excellent and ground-breaking study into the problematic issue of memory politics in contemporary Serbia and its ramifications for other Yugoslav successor states”.
Vjeran Pavlaković, University of Rijeka
“This study is a timely warning of the seriously political consequences of playing politics with the past”.
Jelena Subotić, Georgia State University
“Đureinović’s thought-provoking work draws our attention to the dangers of forgetting, deliberately ignoring and downplaying crimes of the past, and to the dynamics of reinterpreting history to fit political demands and needs in the present”.
Tea Sindbæk Andersen, University of Copenhagen
News, Events, Media
History on the Edge Lecture
As a part of the visiting fellowship at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana, I had a chance to present my ongoing research about the role of war legacies in Yugoslav initiatives of anti-colonial solidarity. Yugoslavia and its institutions and mass organisations invested serious efforts in diplomatic, financial, military and humanitarian assistance to anti-colonial…
“Yugoslavia and Guinea-Bissau – A Connected History”: Lecture in Bissau
On 9 April 2024, I presented my research project at the National Research and Study Institute (Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisa, INEP) in Bissau. In the talk, I focused on the relationship between Yugoslavia and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) in the broader context of Yugoslav assistance to anti-colonial…
Conference: International Friendship within and beyond the Iron Curtain
This workshop aims to explore relations among countries both within and beyond the Iron Curtain through the lens of international friendship. In diplomatic and political history, as well as in public discourse, the term ‘friendship’ is often employed casually to describe various types of interstate relations, ranging from partnerships lacking close bonds to special relationships…
Jelena Đureinović 