Melissa K. Bokovoy 

BOARD PRESIDENT CANDIDATE

Melissa K. Bokovoy is Professor of History and Regents’ Lecturer at the University of New Mexico, where she served as Chair of the Department of History (2013 to 2019 and 2022 to 2025).  She earned a B.A. in History from Pomona College and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in East European History from Indiana University Bloomington. Bokovoy’s research examines twentieth-century Yugoslavia and explores the questions of how its peoples lived under successive regimes and adapted to, shaped, and resisted them. Her archival research across Yugoslavia and its successor states traces how state- and nation-building projects shaped the societies they governed and how peasants, women, soldiers, and national elites reshaped them. 

Her first book, Peasants and Communists: Politics and Ideology in the Yugoslav Countryside, 1941–1953 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), won the Barbara Jelavich Prize of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. She is co-editor of State-Society Relations in Yugoslavia, 1945–1992 (St. Martin’s Press, 1997) and co-author of two multi-volume textbooks on biography and gender in Western Civilization and World History (Houghton Mifflin, 2003 and 2008). She is completing the manuscript, “Serbs, Serbia, and the Politics of Commemorating World War I in Interwar Yugoslavia”. Her articles and chapters on peasants and communists, commemoration, gender, and war have appeared in edited volumes and scholarly journals. 

Bokovoy has received research, conference planning, and programing support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation through the American Historical Association, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She is past President of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS) and completed an elected three-year term as a councilor in the Americal Historical Association’s Research Division.  At the University of New Mexico, she has served as founding Director of the International Studies Institute and was named UNM Outstanding Teacher of the Year. She teaches courses on modern Europe, Cold War Europe, the world wars, nationalism, gender and war, and has led national initiatives to broaden graduate career pathways in the humanities. 

A historian of the twentieth-century Yugoslavia, Bokovoy has built her career outside the field’s traditional centers of gravity, and as ASEEES President she would work to highlight and promote the scholarship and teaching on smaller states and nations, and the scholars who study them. She would also focus on how ASEEES can better support colleagues at teaching institutions and those who are among the few Slavicists on their campus. She is committed to interdisciplinary and transnational approaches that open the field to a broader and more diverse student body by incorporating the scholarship of the region into classes beyond Slavic Studies. She has successfully integrated themes and people(s) from Slavic Studies into her textbooks and courses.  Finally, Bokovoy wants to strengthen the recruitment and retention of underrepresented students and scholars across the field.