Tuesday, April 28, 2026
Jovana Babović
Jovana Babović is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at SUNY Geneseo.
When did you first develop an interest in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies?
I first became interested in our region when I took a class on East European history with Thom Ort while I was a master’s student at NYU’s Center for European and Mediterranean Studies. Thom had assigned an article by Maria Todorova and encouraged me to read her then recently-published book Imagining the Balkans. That book drew me into the field and empowered me to start asking my own questions about the region. A few years later, I applied to work with Maria, and I ended up completing my PhD with her at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
How have your interests changed since your initial interest in the field?
While I’ve remained consistently interested in Yugoslav history, my approach to its study has evolved over time. In graduate school, I was trained to work with archival documents, and I spent two years in Serbia researching my dissertation that became my first book Metropolitan Belgrade: Class and Culture in Interwar Yugoslavia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). I enjoyed the solitary work of combing through sources in dusty reading rooms, but I so often wished I could dialogue with the historical actors I was studying. Years later, when the pandemic stalled my plans for research abroad, I took it as a sign to redirect my work to center living subjects through oral history. That work turned into my latest book The Youngest Yugoslavs: An Oral History of Post-Socialist Memory (Indiana University Press, 2025). I found that I enjoyed working with people, and I am incorporating oral history into my future projects.
What is your current research/work project?
I am developing an oral history project about the Bosnian community in Utica, NY. This is a community of more than 5,000 residents that has been settling in the region since the 1990s. Most members are survivors of violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide during the Bosnian War. The war precipitated the displacement of two million people, many of whom have been unable to return home. Bosnian refugees who settled abroad created new homes and developed new hybrid identities. Utica’s Bosnian community is both tightly knit, with many of its own associations, groups, and businesses, but also well-integrated into the larger social fabric. It’s situated in a reviving post-industrial urban space that’s home to a diverse refugee population. My project studies how members of the Bosnian community in Utica actively negotiate their sense of identity vis-à-vis their former homeland and their present community. While the stories of refugees are usually told through the lens of suffering and survival, my aim is to show how members of the Bosnian community define themselves years and even decades after their initial dislocation.
What do you value about your ASEEES membership?
I value my ASEEES membership because it helps me maintain and build a robust professional network. I’ve been attending the annual conference for nearly two decades, and I always return home reinvigorated. I’ve also enjoyed serving on various ASEEES committees, including the First Book Subvention Committee, the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize Committee, and the Holmgren Graduate Student Essay Prize Committee, as well as reviewing books for Slavic Review. Most recently, I’ve started participating in the ASEEES Mentoring Program as a senior mentor. The work I do for ASEEES is my favorite form of service because it introduces me to new colleagues and the exciting scholarship they are creating.