Danilo Šarenac
Danilo Šarenac (1980) is a senior researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History in Belgrade. He defended his dissertation at the University of Belgrade in 2011. His research focuses on the cultural and social impact of the 1912-1918 wars in the Balkans. He also deals with topics related to the culture of remembrance and the history of technology.

Brown Bag: How to Historicize a Paranoia: Serbia's defence against the Revision of History (2014-2018)

Samantha Guzman

Guzman received an MA in Comparative History from Central European University in 2016 and a second MA in Military History and Strategic Studies from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth in 2018. She is a PhD candidate at the Historical Institute of the University of Bern in Switzerland and currently a visiting researcher at the Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz. The topic of her dissertation is the formation of Kosovar Albanian political and nationalist organisations in Central Europe during the twentieth century.

Brown Bag: The War Back Home: Kosovo Albanian Political and Nationalist Organisations in Central Europe, 1968-1998

Vladimir Vučković

Vučković is a visiting lecturer at the Department of International Relations and European Studies at Masaryk University. His research focuses on the European Union, populism in Europe and political and socio-economic developments in the Western Balkans. In 2017, he held a visiting fellowship at the Department of Political Science at Stockholm University. He is the author of the monograph Europeanizing Montenegro: The European Union, the Rule of Law, and Regional Cooperation (2021) and editor of the volume Balkanizing Europeanization: Fight against Corruption and Regional Relations in the Western Balkans (2019). His publications have appeared in the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Romanian Journal of European Affairs and Europe-Asia Studies and Political Studies Review, among others.

Brown Bag: Colliding Neighbours: Serbia and Montenegro in Post-Yugoslav Context - Identity and Interest Representation

Sarah Craycraft

Craycraft is a PhD candidate in Comparative Studies and Folklore at Ohio State University. Her dissertation focuses on rural revitalisation in Bulgaria, specifically exploring residency projects as forms of return and reconnection between generations and places in comparison to other forms of engagement with village life - physical mobility, nostalgic return, curated short-term experiences (volunteering, travel/tourism, residencies), commodification and consumption. Other interests include heritagisation and revival, ideologies/pedagogies of needlework, public humanities, embroidery and women's textile practices, space and place studies, Appalachian folklore and border studies.

Brown Bag: Reinventing the Village: Youth, Heritage, and Revitalisation in Contemporary Bulgaria

Dimitra Mareta

Mareta holds a PhD in Political Science from the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences. She currently teaches political science at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where she is also a post-doctoral researcher, and was a visiting scholar in political science at the University of Peloponnese during the 2018-2019 academic year. Her research and teaching interests include state theory and theory of sovereignty, counterrevolution, Greek politics, right-wing politics, liberalism and neoliberalism. She has published academic articles on the state, sovereignty and liberalism and has participated in national and international conferences.

Brown Bag: The Neoliberal Transformation of Higher Education in Greece

Martina Plantak

Plantak is a doctoral candidate in politics at the joint Ph.D. programme of Andrassy University Budapest and Danube University Krems. She completed a Master's degree in International Relations and Diplomacy in Zagreb, Croatia. Her research focuses on nationalism, media, Europeanisation and the Western Balkans. She is currently working on her dissertation on nationalism and identity politics of the second generation of migrants from the former Yugoslav countries in Slovenia. Plantak has written articles on the Europeanisation and regionalisation of the media in the Western Balkans and on the role of music as a means of political propaganda.

Brown Bag: Everyday Nationalism in Slovenia towards the Second Generation of Migrants from Former Yugoslav Countries

Aslı Aygüneş

Aygüneş received her B.A. in American Culture and Literature from Bilkent University and her M.A. in Women's and Gender Studies from the University of South Florida. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the PhD programme in Gender Studies at Sabanci University. Her research interests are feminist organising, activism and transnational feminism. Her recently published works are: Aygüneş A., & Golombisky, K. (2020). "Shifting Subjectivities, Cultivating Safe Spaces: Mothers' Perspectives on Women's Virginity in Contemporary Turkey" Journal of Research on Women and Gender, 10(1), 23-42.

Brown Bag: Reflections on Volunteering and Civic Participation in Gender NGOs in Turkey

Jovana Papovic

Papovic is currently pursuing a PhD in history at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (EHESS-CETOBaC), where she is researching the political, cultural and social impact of the Sokol movement in interwar Yugoslavia. Previously, she completed a Master's degree in Anthropology at EHESS and a Master's degree in Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Belgrade. She has also conducted research and published articles and book chapters on youth cultures and activism in contemporary Serbia.

Brown Bag: The Manufacture of a Yugoslav Culture : the Sokol Movement in Interwar Yugoslavia

Maria Adamopoulou

Adamopoulou is a PhD candidate in history at the European University Institute (Florence). She is a historian by training, but always open to interdisciplinary debates. She is currently working on her dissertation on Greek labour migration to the Federal Republic of Germany in the period 1960-1989, focusing on the Greek government's initiatives towards guest workers in West Germany and their reactions and counter-initiatives. Her research focusses on social and cultural history, oral tradition and memory as well as migration research.

Brown Bag: Greek Guest Workers in the Federal Republic of Germany: 30 Years in 30 Minutes

Karlo Kralj

Kralj is a doctoral candidate in political science and sociology at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the Scuola Normale Superiore and a member of the Centre on Social Movement Studies. As part of his PhD project, Karlo is analysing the recent cases of radical left parties in the post-Yugoslavian context. His main research interests are social movement studies and left activism in post-socialist Europe. Before starting his doctoral studies, Karlo was active in Zagreb-based organisations, most notably the Croatian Youth Network and the Centre for Peace Studies, where he was involved in organising advocacy and protest campaigns.

Brown Bag: Pathways to Politics: Radical Left Electoral Turn in Southeast Europe

Boshko Stankovski

Stankovski received the Partnership for Peace Fellowship for 2020 at the NATO Defence College in Rome, Italy. His PhD thesis at the University of Cambridge focuses on peace agreements on self-determination and secession disputes and the engagement of the international community in this process. He holds an MPhil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge. Boshko Stankovski was a 2014/2015 Research Fellow at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, where he studied the complexity of secession negotiations and the role of international law. He has served as an expert witness and prepared reports for the Danish Refugee Council and the Council of Europe, as well as a case study on the Ohrid Framework Agreement for the Berghof Foundation of Berlin and the UN Mediation Support Unit. He was a McCloskey Fellow at the Institute of Russian and East European Studies in Bloomington, Indiana, USA (2010), and a visiting scholar at Sydney Law School, Australia (2012). He is a member of the core team of the Conflict Analysis Lab at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, and a senior associate of NNEdPro at the University of Cambridge.

Brown Bag: Dissolution of Former Yugoslavia Seen from the Perspectives of SEE Countries: From Competing Narratives to Fuelling Future Conflicts

Ivo Bosilkov

Bosilkov is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Network for the Advancement of Social and Political Studies at the University of Milan and at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research at the University of Amsterdam. His PhD thesis focuses on the impact of media coverage of the migrant crisis on the populist attitudes of Macedonian citizens. He is currently working on developing the doctrines of illiberal-transformative populism, a central concept in his doctoral thesis. In addition to populism, his research interests include media framing, European identity and political psychology. His preferred research methodology is experimental design.

Brown Bag: The Dimensions of Illiberal-Transformative Populism

Ivana Polić

Polić is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of California San Diego, where she is also a teaching assistant for the "Making of the Modern World" programme. She holds a Master's degree in History and English Language and Literature (Teaching) from the University of Rijeka, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Her research interest is the history of Southeast Europe after 1945, with a focus on the history of childhood. Her dissertation project deals with the significance of children for nation-building in post-independence Croatia and Serbia and was supported by the ASEEES Dissertation Research Grant and the Frontiers of Innovation Scholars' Programme of the University of California, among others.

Brown Bag: The (Re)Making of Young Patriots: Children and Nation-building in Croatia and Republic of Srpska Krajina (1990-1995)

Ezgi Guner

Guner received her BA degree in Cultural Studies from Sabanci University in Istanbul. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation focuses on the nexus of ethnicity and religion with global capital accumulation in the context of Turkey's contemporary relations with sub-Saharan Africa. With support from the SSRC, the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the UIUC Graduate College, Guner conducted ethnographic research with businesses, state institutions, religious non-governmental organisations and Islamic schools in Turkey, Tanzania, Senegal, Benin and The Gambia. In 2018, she was a visiting scholar at the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. Her research interests include critical ethnicity, humanitarianism, ethnography of the state, Islamic education, Turkey, West Africa.

Brown Bag: Rethinking Race in Turkey in and through 'Sub-Saharan Africa'

Dimitrios Kosmopoulos

Kosmopoulos holds an MA in Political Science and History from the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Greece and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Paris-Dauphine-PSL. His doctoral thesis deals with the political upheavals in Greece between 2010 and 2014, a period marked by the economic crisis and the implementation of structural and economic adjustment programmes. His research interests include the study of party systems and political crises, the sociology of political parties and political elites, and European politics in a comparative perspective. He is also interested in the structure of politics and politics in Southeast Europe.

Brown Bag: Migration policies in Greece since 2014 : Framing Migrant Crisis as a Transnational Issue

Marina Vulović

Vulović is a PhD candidate at the University of Helsinki (2017-2020) in the Doctoral Programme for Political, Social and Regional Change (PSRC). She holds a B.A. degree from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, and an M.A. degree from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Her PhD project focuses on Serbian-Kosovar relations and examines how hegemonic narratives around political myths have been renegotiated in Serbia since 2012, focussing in particular on the importance of Kosovo for the Serbian nationalist project. Her recent and forthcoming publications deal with the Brussels dialogue, performative statehood in Northern Kosovo, etc. She is also working on a series of articles for a local NGO in Kosovo to bring the Brussels dialogue closer to the public. She has been a visiting researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Oxford, UK (2018), the University of Graz, Austria (2019) and the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Germany (2020).

Brown Bag: The Belgrade-Pristina Dialogue since 2012: From Community to Partition

Slavka Karakusheva

Karakusheva is a PhD candidate at the Department of History and Cultural Theory at the University of St Kliment Ohridski in Sofia. She holds a Master's degree in Cultural Anthropology and a Bachelor's degree in Cultural Studies from the same institution. Her research focuses on the connections between migration processes, identification strategies and the politics of nation-building in relation to Turks in/from Bulgaria. Research interests in the fields of: Migration, mobility and transnationalism; nation-building, minorities, identity and belonging in the Balkans; memory studies; media anthropology; Ottoman heritage.

Brown Bag: The (Re)Making of Young Patriots: Children and Nation-building in Croatia and Republic of Srpska Krajina (1990-1995)