Jelena Spasenic

PhD, Senior lecturer, Physician

I was born in Belgrade, Serbia in 1979 and have been living in Sweden since 2000. I started as a philologist (specializing in Scandinavian languages and literature, and English) trained at Belgrade University. At Uppsala University, I have obtained degrees in Swedish/Scandinavian languages (Bachelor), Cultural Anthropology (PhD) and Medicine (Degree of Master of Science in Medicine). I have also completed undergraduate studies in English and Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian.

At Uppsala University, I have been teaching continuously since 2001 in a number of subjects. At the Department of Modern Languages, I have been in charge of many undergraduate courses in Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, such as grammar, conversation, history of literature, and regional history. I am also one of the lecturers on the following graduate level courses: "Research in Languages: Linguistic Methods" and "Post-Nationalist Socialisms in Literature, Film and Art". At the Hugo Valentin Centre, I have taught courses in "Social Mechanisms of Violence", "Ethnicity and Politics" and "Psychology of Violence," as part of the Master's Program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. At the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, I have taught undergraduate-level essay writing.

I have also previously worked as a senior lecturer in anthropology at Stockholm University, where I taught undergraduate methods course and supervised bachelor theses.

I obtained a PhD degree in cultural anthropology from Uppsala University with the thesis called The Shadows of the Past. A Study of Life-World and Identity of Serbian Youth after The Milošević Regime (awarded with the Benzelius Prize for 2012). My research area includes phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, social identity theory, cognition, ethnicity, nationalism and youth culture. The borderland between anthropology, sociology and social psychology has been of particular interest to me.