Dragana Obradovic (Ph.D. University College-London, 2009) is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her research interests are regionally connected to the literature of the former Yugoslavia. She is interested in the legacy of state socialism as it pertains to class transformation, the rural/urban divide, and the depiction of labour in literature and film. She is the author of Writing the Yugoslav Wars: Literature, Postmodernism, and the Ethics of Representation (University of Toronto Press, 2016).
What I'm working on: Between Socialist Modernity and the Peasant Co-Operative: Communalism of the Rural in Yugoslavia
This project investigates rural life under Yugoslav socialism (1945-1991) in order to generate new and important knowledge of under-researched village communities, which will address pressing problems around how we might tackle contemporary material emergencies (such as environmental crises) and influence contemporary studies of real existing socialism. My study of the rural in Yugoslavia, where socialist collective ideology encountered communalism of the village, contains potential to inform present needs: what kind of community economies—communities that are premised on social inter-dependence—can emerge from our knowledge of history?