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Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature

• Affiliation(s)

  • Comparative Literature, CREES, Slavic Languages & Literatures

• Fields of Study

  • Literary Theory
  • Postmodern Fiction
  • Contemporary Balkan literature, with an emphasis on Serbian and Modern Greek fiction
  • Balkan Film
  • Myth, History, and Memory
  • Nationalism
  • Postcolonialism
  • Exile
  • Issues of Identity
  • Gender Issues
  • Music

• About

  Tatjana Aleksic received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University in 2007 and has been teaching at the University of Michigan since 2007. She is the editor of Mythistory and Narratives of the Nation in the Balkans (2007). Additional publications include articles on nationalism, gender, language, and myth and translations into Serbian of short fiction, haiku, and medical textbooks.  She is the recipient of research awards from the University of Michigan (2008), Serbian Ministry for the Diaspora (2008), and a Rutgers University Dean’s fellowship (2002-2004).  She is active in National Association for Slavic Studies, the American Comparative Literature Association, and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Ongoing projects include a book manuscript on sacrifice, the body, and the nation.  Teaching interests in Comparative Literature include undergraduate courses on twentieth-century culture and history, women and myth, and graduate seminars on nationalism, and poststructuralist theory.

  Languages: Serbo-Croatian (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, native), working knowledge of French, Italian, Latin, Modern Greek.

  Select Publications:

  • Mythistory and Narratives of the Nation in the Balkans, ed. Tatjana Aleksic (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007)
  • “Making Patriarchal History Women’s Own: Eugenia Fakinou’s The Seventh Garment.” Forthcoming in Sanja Bahun-Radunovic and Julie Rajan, eds., Myth and Violence in Contemporary Female Text: New Cassandras, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010.
  • “Southeast European Novel,” Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel,  ed. Peter Logan, 2010.
  • “National Definition through Postmodern Fragmentation: Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars,” Slavic and East European Journal (SEEJ) 53:1 (Spring 2009): 86-104.
  • “The Emerging Subject of Rhea Galanaki’s Ismail Ferik Pasha,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 27:1 (May 2009): 31-54.
  • “Grief Can only Be Written in One’s Mother Tongue.” Literature of Exile, ed. Agnieszka Gutty (New York, Berlin: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009) 155-175.
  • “Disintegrating Narratives and Nostalgia in Post-Yugoslav Postmodern Fiction.” Balkan Literatures in the Era of Nationalism, Murat Belge, Jale Parla, eds. Istanbul, Turkey: Bilgi University Press, 2009, 3-14.
  • “Extricating the Self from History: Bait by David Albahari.” MMLA Journal 39:2 (Fall 2006): 54-70.
  • Review of Lorraine Mortimer, Terror and Joy: The Films of Dušan Makavejev in The Slavic Review (Summer, 2010).
  • Review of Danilo Kiš, Mansarda, tr. John Cox in World Literature Today (March/April 2009): 68-9.
  • Review of Dubravka Ugrešic, Lend Me Your Character, tr. Celia Hawkesworth and Michael Henry Heim in Balkanistica 20, (Spring 2007): 185-187.

• Education

  • 2002 MA in English Literature and Theory, University Of Nis, Serbia
    2007 Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Rutgers University