Notes on Contributors
Marina Biti
is professor at the Department of Croatian Studies (University of Rijeka) and at the Department of Media, Communication and Journalism (University North). She was the founder of the Department of Cultural Studies in Rijeka and the initiator/coordinator of two interdisciplinary doctoral programmes. Her research interests predominantly lie in the field of cognitive poetics, as best documented by the book The Poetics of Mind which she co-authored with Danijela Marot Kiš in 2008. In more recent articles she specifically focused on examining literary trauma from a cognitive perspective, as in The Silenced Narrator and the Notion of “Proto-Narrative” (with Iva Rosanda Žigo, 2021). In her other books and scientific articles, she explored topics in cultural and digital cultural studies, discourse theory, critical discourse analysis, stylistics, etc.
Matija Jelača
is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula (Croatia) where he teaches courses in literary theory, history of literature, comparative literature and semiotics. He has given talks and published papers (in English and Croatian) at the intersection of contemporary continental (G. Deleuze, speculative realism) and analytic philosophy (W. Sellars, R. Brandom) (most notably “Sellars Contra Deleuze on Intuitive Knowledge,” 2014), on H.P. Lovecraft’s weird fiction (“On the Horror of Knowledge: Speculative Realism and H.P. Lovecraft,” 2019), and on the TV series The Wire (“From Rationalism to Realism in The Wire,” 2016).
Ante Jerić
is lecturer at the Department of Croatian Language and Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka. His research moves between philosophy, narratology and film studies. He is the author of the book Uz Malabou: profili suvremenog mišljenja (Zagreb, Multimedijalni institut, 2016).
Danijela Marot Kiš
is Associate Professor of Literary Theory at the Department of Croatian Language and Literature of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka. She is an executive editor of Fluminensia, a journal for philological research published by the Department of Croatian Language and Literature; the co-author of monographs Poetics of Mind – Winning, Questioning and Saving Meaning and Exile and Trauma: Examples from Post-Yugoslav Prose (with Marina Biti) and Personifications – Literary Subject and Politics of Impersonality (with Aleksandar Mijatović).
Iva Kosmos
is a researcher at ZRC SAZU, Institute of Culture and Memory Studies. Kosmos graduated from the University of Zagreb (2015), was a Fullbright fellow at UW-Madison (2014) and a guest researcher at the Center for Southeast European Studies at University of Graz (2016–2017). She graduated with a thesis on contemporary post-Yugoslav writers on the international literary market. Recently she is focused on memory politics of remembering Yugoslavia in art and everyday practices. She has published in Slovenian, Croatian and international journals and editions, including East European Politics and Societies and The Slavonic and East European Review. She co-edited the monograph Stories from Tin Cans: History of the Fish Canning Industry in the Northeast Adriatic (in Slovenian, translated to Croatian, 2020).
Miranda Levanat-Peričić
is an associate professor at the Department of Croatian Studies, University of Zadar, where she teaches courses in comparative literature, contemporary literature and literary theory. Her research interests include literary posthumanism, speculative fiction and dystopian novels, monster theory / monster studies, post-Yugoslav literature and Balkan studies. Recently she published two books in Croatian: Introduction to the Monster Theory: from Humbaba to Caliban (2014) and Comparative Binoculars: on Croatian Literature and Culture (2017) and co-edited two books, also in Croatian: Liber Monstrorum Balcanorum (2019) and The First May of Brešan (2020).
Tijana Matijević
is an independent researcher and a teaching associate at the Universities Martin Luther in Halle and Friedrich Schiller in Jena. She is interested in feminist and counter-hegemonic explorations of post-Yugoslav literature and culture, and writes texts that utilize feminist knowledge and expand on continuities between Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literatures. In 2014 she published the book Post-Yugoslav Film and Literature Production: An Alternative to Mainstream Political and Cultural Discourse, and in 2018, co-edited the volume Schwimmen gegen den Strom? Diskurse weiblicher Autorschaft im postjugoslawischen Kontext. Her book From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent: A Feminist Reading of Post-Yugoslav Literature came out in 2020 in transcript Verlag.
Aleksandar Mijatović
is an Associate Professor of Literary Theory and History at the Department of Croatian Language and Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka. He has recently authored the book Temporalities of Post-Yugoslav Literature: The Politics of Time (2020) with Lexington Books, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield.
Mirko Milivojević
is an independent researcher and PhD candidate in Literary and Cultural Studies at Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Germany. He is a former research assistant and lecturer in the Slavic Department at Justus-Liebig University Giessen and holds M.A. in Comparative Literature (Erfurt University, Germany). His main research interests include contemporary (Post-)Yugoslav literature and popular culture, memory studies (primarily Southeast European and post-socialist contexts, transmedial and transnational practices), and cultural theory. He is an author of several essays and articles/reviews on contemporary post-Yugoslav cinema and literary production, published in edited volumes (Introducing Wounds: Challenging the ‘Crap Theory of Pain’ in Nikola Lezaić’s Tilva Roš, 2015), and in scientific journals (Rat i pitanje postmoderne e(ste)tike, 2019).
Lujo Parežanin
is a doctoral candidate at the Postgraduate Programme in Literature, Performing Arts, Film and Culture at the University of Zagreb, where he is writing his thesis on the poet Josip Sever. His research primarily focuses on Yugoslav culture and neo-avant-garde art and literature in the Cold War context. He is a researcher at the Modernism and the Avant-garde in the Yugoslav Context and Drežnica: Traces and Memories 1941–1945 projects and the co-editor of the books Criticism in Transition: A Glossary of Visual Arts Criticism (Kulturtreger, Kurziv, Zagreb, 2019) and Unrepressed Subjectivity: A Glossary of Performing Arts Criticism (Kulturtreger, Kurziv, Zagreb, 2019).
Zala Pavšič
is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Media, Ljubljana, and has responsibility for the course Contemporary History. Her main research areas include friendship studies, memory studies, the disintegration of Yugoslavia and gender studies. She is the 2021/2022 Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow (EUI, Florence), where she will work on a project further investigating gender aspects of the discourse of friendship. Active as a translator, her translations of Mikhail Lermontov’s poems were included in the 2014 book of new translations published to honour the 200th anniversary of the poet’s death. She is the recipient of various Slovenian and international fellowships and grants.
Boris Postnikov
is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences in Zagreb, working on a thesis on Post-Yugoslav Literature: The Construction of a Field. The cultural editor of a Novosti weekly (Zagreb) and author of weekly radio broadcast The Glossary of Post-Yugoslav Literature (Croatian National Radio, 2012–2015), he is also a contributor of many cultural and literary media in Croatia and post-Yugoslav region, writing predominantly essays, comments and literary reviews; further, he is an author of books of collected essays Post-Yugoslav Literature? (Sandorf, Zagreb, 2012) and And Now a Word from Our Sponsor (V.B.Z., Zagreb, 2013), co-author of policy paper National Report on the State of Media (Croatian Ministry of Culture, 2015) and co-editor of a post-Yugoslav war literature anthology Once there was a Country (Paralela 45, Bucharest, 2018).
Kujtim Rrahmani
is a senior researcher/professor of literature at the Institute of Albanology in Prishtina, Kosovo. Rrahmani’s research focuses on the intersections between poetics and emotions, intertextuality and orality, myth, epics, and fairy tale, and polis and poiesis. He is e widely published author, author of five monographs – including Anthropoetics (Prishtina, aikd 2008) and Warrior Naturalis (Prishtina, iap 2020) – and winner of national prizes for novel/short stories (1994, 2017) and literary studies (2020). He has been a visiting research fellow at many universities abroad (George Washington University, University of Michigan, LSE in London, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris, Heidelberg University, Free University of Berlin, University of Freiburg etc.).
Anera Ryznar
is an assistant professor at the Chair for Stylistics, Department of Croatian language and literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. She teaches courses in stylistics and literary criticism and specializes in the study of contemporary Croatian fiction. She is the editor of the academic portal Stilistika.org and of the Journal of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Tuzla. She is the author of the monograph Contemporary Novel in the Jaws of Life: A study in Interdiscursivity (Disput, Zagreb, 2017), a translator of several monographs in linguistics and literary theory (G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, M. Dolar, R. Felski) and the editor of many collective works.
Saša Stanić
is an assistant lecturer at the Department of Croatian Language and Literature of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka. He teaches courses on literary theory and stylistics. His primary interests are contemporary Croatian literature, popular culture, media and cinema in theoretical and practical terms. He is a co-author of a book Fragmented Images of the World: Critical Analysis of Contemporary Film and Media Production along with Boris Ružić (Facultas, Rijeka, 2012) in which he tackles the theoretical principles of a film making process with the emphasis on the phenomena of the spectacle.
Brian Willems
is associate professor of literature and film at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split. His most recent books are Zugov učinak (Multimedia Institute Zagreb, 2022) and Sham Ruins: A User’s Guide (Routledge, 2021).