On Thursday, July 11th, 2024 at 12:00 PM (CET), we are hosting the CAS SEE Seminar with Christian Voss on “Towards a Cultural History of Albanians in Tito‘s Yugoslavia” in conversation with the RECAS Fellow Elona Gjata.
Christian Voss
Christian Voss is Director of the Institute for Slavic and Hungarian Studies and Head of the Department for South Slavic Studies at Humboldt University Berlin. He finished his PhD on Church Slavonic in 1996 and his habilitation on Slavic minorities in Greece in 2004 in Freiburg i.Br. He has extensively published in the fields of sociolinguistics, contact linguistics and language policy in the Balkans. He is the founding director of the interdisciplinary centre “Crossing Borders” in Berlin, editor of the series “Studies on Language and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe” and co-editor of several journals.
About the Seminar
The lecture discusses the cultural contribution of the Albanian-speaking population in Tito’s Yugoslavia under the condition of its highly contradictory political treatment, oscillating between repression and overt promotion. The biographies of “cultural defectors” like the poet Esad Mekuli, famous actors Bekim Fehmiu and Faruk Begolli or sportsmen Fadil Vokrri clearly indicate that the riots in Kosovo in 1981 triggered the loss of Yugoslav loyalty among the Albanians. The limits of Yugoslav nation-building can also be shown in the representation of Albanian in Miroslav Krleža’s “Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia”, where Serbian nationalist intervention in 1981 insisted on the rewriting of the articles on Albania(ns) to reinstall the traditional hegemonist and paternalistic discourse.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88989643663?pwd=VnZTOWRmdnl0WEZIdTczc1paZWtkdz09
Meeting ID: 889 8964 3663
Passcode: 328897
Fellowship
Fellowships are supported by OSF Western Balkans, ERSTE Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
UNIRI The Moise Palace: Cres Island
An education center of the University of Rijeka. A five-hundred-year-old patrician townhouse and the largest Renaissance palace on the Croatian islands. A venue and forum for various scientific and research activities, it welcomes visiting academics, students and scholars.
