Melissa Bokovoy, associate professor of history and regents’ lecturer, has been chosen as one of two dozen scholars who will be in residence for the 2005-2006 academic year at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The center supports research in the social sciences and humanities.
An internationally recognized expert on 20th century Yugoslavia, Bokovoy will join scholars and academics from a wide variety of backgrounds and countries. Residential fellows are chosen through an international competition and upon their award are resident at the center.
Fellows conduct research and write in their areas of interest, while interacting with policymakers in Washington and Wilson Center Public Policy Scholars and Senior Scholars. While at the center, Bokovoy will continue the research and writing on her manuscript, “Memory and Mourning in Serbia and Croatia, 1918-1941.”
Only the second UNM history faculty member to be awarded this fellowship, Bokovoy follows her predecessor, Stephen Kramer, also a modern Europeanist in the UNM History Department, as a Wilson Fellow.
“The most exciting part of this fellowship is the opportunity to be in constant
dialogue with diplomats, scholars and policymakers who have real impact on decisions being made about the U.S.’s role in the world. Every day the center sponsors events ranging from topics on Islam, gender and reproductive health to panel discussions on the European Union’s possible expansion into the Balkans. The hardest decision I will have to make is which ones to attend and which ones to miss so I can get my research and writing done,” Bokovoy said.
Her current research is a historical study of the politics of commemoration in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia between 1918 and 1941. She examines how the Serbs and the Croats, individually and collectively, mourned, remembered and commemorated those who lost their lives in the Balkan Wars and World War I and how the resulting cultures of commemoration and distinct historical understandings of the wars clashed in the period leading up to World War II.
In her research, she travels past a number of “sites of memory, sites of mourning,” the sites being the physical, emotional and artistic artifacts of those who survived the war and found themselves in the new multinational Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians in December 1918.
Sites of memory, such as war cemeteries and memorials, museums and their display, holidays forms of popular culture and personal remembrances, are viewed by the Kingdom’s new elites as potential battlegrounds for the shaping, forging and reworking of political, national and social identities from 1918-1941.
“At the beginning of my fellowship at the Wilson Center, I will complete my research at the Library of Congress. A necessary part of this research is to read and analyze interwar elementary and high school textbooks and educational journals and memoirs from the soldiers and officers penned after the war, and an important photographic album, War Album (Ratni Album). The album is a compilation of more than 2,000 photographs from World War I in the south Slavic territories. The photos were originally displayed in Paris in 1917 and published in Serbia in 1925.
“The materials I have selected are quite specific because of their unavailability in the United States except for the Library of Congress, thus residence in the Washington area is a necessity. Finally, the south Slavic reference materials at the Library of Congress are plentiful and having such reference books at one's fingertips is invaluable for any scholar writing a historical monograph.
I anticipate that a nine-month residential fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars will help me complete a draft of the proposed historical monograph as well as write several journal articles from this research to be submitted to “The Journal of Modern History” and “Slavic Review.” I intend to complete work on the manuscript during summer 2006, immediately after my stay at the Center, and submit the manuscript for publication in fall 2006.
Established by an act of Congress in 1968, the Wilson Center is our nation’s official living memorial to President Woodrow Wilson. As both a distinguished scholar, the only American President with a Ph.D., and a national leader, Wilson felt strongly that the scholar and the policymaker were “engaged in a common enterprise.”
Contact: Carolyn Gonzales, (505) 277-5920
Posted by scarr at May 11, 2005 04:55 PM