Iva Lucic

Short presentation

Iva Lucic is Associate Professor of History. She holds a PhD in history from the University of Uppsala. Her research focuses on modern South-eastern European and East Central-European history. Central research areas in her work include nation- and state-building processes, political mobilization processes, religiosity as social practice during post-Habsburg transition, post-Ottoman transition in South-eastern Europe, war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and bystanders.

Biography

Since September 2019: Senior Lecturer at the Department of Education, Uppsala University

Since August 2018: Researcher at the Department of History, Stockholm University.

August 2017-2018: Senior lecturer at the Department of Education, Uppsala University.

2016: Invited visiting fellow (post-doc) at the Institute for Human Sciences (Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen) in Vienna, Austria.

February 2012: Linneaus teacher at the Department of History and Department of Foreign Affairs at Kolkata University, India, 9 guest lectures, funded by Linnaeus–Palme exchange programme, spring 2012.

January-April 2011: Visiting graduate student at the Faculty of History at University of Oxford (Hilary Term 2011), funded by STINT.

Since 2009: Member of the academic network "Herrschaft in Südosteuropa- kultur- und sozialwissenschaftliche Perspektiven" supported by DFG and Max-Weber Kolleg, University of Erfurt, Germany.

2008-2016: PhD candidate at the Department of History, Uppsala University, Sweden. Monograph: Im Namen der Nation. Der politische Aufwertungsprozess der Muslime im sozialistischen Jugoslawien (1956-1971). Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis 2016 (Studia Historica Upsaliensia 256).

November-December 2007: research project for “Forum för levande historia” on bystanders in the 1990s war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

2007-2010: Junior researcher in the project “New and Ambiguous Nation-building Processes in South-Eastern Europe” at Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany.

Since 2010: Project about the foundation history of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Eucharist “Kloster Herrnau der Schwestern von der hlgst. Eucharistie” in Salzburg. Monograph expected in 2017.

2006-2008: Master of Arts programme "Roads to Democracy(ies)", Department of History, Uppsala University.

2001-2005: Studies in history and theology at the Department of History and Department of Theology at Paris-Lodron University in Salzburg, Austria.

2000-2005: Opera singing education at Mozarteum University in Salzburg, Austria. Diploma concert defended in May 2005.

Research

My current work examines the consolidation of Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina after four centuries of Ottoman control in the region, exploring the formation of imperial authority and law, and subject-ruler relations during the complex inter-imperial transition.

My first book, In Namen der Nation: Der politische Aufwertungsprozess der Muslime im sozialistichen Jugoslawien (1956-1971), based on my dissertation, was published in 2016 as with Acta Universitatis Upsalienis (Studia Historica Upsaliensia, Bd. 256). It was awarded the Westin prize by the Royal Society of the Humanities at Uppsala and the Fritz Exner Prize by the Südosteuropa Gesellschaft in Munich. It explores the dynamics of the political process of political elevation of Muslims in Socialist Yugoslavia. The book combines political, economic, legal, and cultural history of Socialist Yugoslavia in order to illuminate the mobilization process that led to a change of political perception of Muslims from a religious group to a nation. The research draws in particular on archival sources and internal documents of the League of Communists in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Yugoslavia and public debates concerning Muslim (national) identity in the media. In addition to historical materials, I conducted interviews with former party members and intellectuals that had been involved in the process of “national recognition of Muslims”. In my work I argue that the political elevation of Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina was the result of a mobilization process beginning in the 1950s. It was driven by the League of Communists of Bosnia and Herzegovina in service of the affirmation of Bosnian statehood in the wake of the decentralization of Yugoslav federation and the political devaluation of the Yugoslav identity. The Bosnian political cadre tried to promote Bosnia and Herzegovina as a unique and multinational republic, whose political subjectivity was built around a tripartite national structure, made up of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims.

Second edition of "Im Namen der Nation" was published in 2018 with Harrassowitz Verlag in Germany. Currently, the book is being translated into Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian.

My second monograph Gebrochenes Brot. Eine Frauenkongregation zwischen den Weltkriegen. Die Eucharistieschwestern (Anton Pustet Verlag 2020) is on the founding of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holiest Eucharist in Czechoslovakia during the Interwar Period. As part of this project I have analyzed continuities and ruptures of religiousity as a social practice among Catholics especially nobles in Bohemia, after the break-up of the Habsburg Monarchy and the role of women in the Catholic Church prior to the Second Vatican Council.