Please join the Harriman Institute, in collaboration with the East Central European Center and the Njegos Endowment for Serbian Language and Culture, for a workshop with Branislav Jakovljević (Stanford University) and Branka Arsić (Columbia University) in association with Aleksandar Bošković’s seminar "Balkan as a Metaphor."
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Radomir Konstantinović’s Filozofija palanke (The Philosophy of Parochialism, 1969). Konstantinović’s book is relevant not only in Serbia and countries of the former Yugoslavia, but also beyond in the context of our global world. Filozofija palanke offers a new analysis of the causes of totalitarianism, as well as an innovative methodology of the political reading of literature, specifically poetry. The English translation of Konstantinović’s book by Ljiljana Nikolić and Branislav Jakoviljević, introduced and edited by Jakoviljević, is forthcoming. The workshop is open to the general public.
Branislav Jakovljević is Professor and Department Chair at the Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford. He is the author of Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia 1945-1991 (University of Michigan Press 2016), winner of the 2017 ATHE Outstanding Book Award, and of the Joe A. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theater for 2016-17. His most recent book, Smrznuti magarac i drugi eseji (Frozen Donkey and Other Essays, 2017), was published in Serbian language in Belgrade. Jakovljević publishes widely on subjects ranging from history of modernist theater, to experimental performance, to avant-garde and conceptual art, to contemporary performance. His articles appeared in leading scholarly journals in the United States (Theatre Journal, TDR, PAJ, Art Journal, Art Margins, Theater) and in Europe. In 2013 he chaired the 19th annual Performance Studies international conference "Now Then: Performance and Temporality" at Stanford University. His first book Daniil Kharms: Writing and the Event was published by Northwestern University Press in 2009.
Branka Arsić is Charles and Lynn Zhang Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She specializes in literatures of the 19th century Americas and their scientific, philosophical and religious contexts. She is the author, most recently, of Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (Harvard University Press, 2016), which was awarded the MLA James Russell Lowell prize for the outstanding book of 2016. It discusses how Thoreau related mourning practices to biological life by articulating a complex theory of decay, and proposing a new understanding of the pathological.