One of the innovations of the CSMCH when it was set up in 2017 was to introduce a 3-month visiting postdoctoral fellowship in modern and contemporary history, in collaboration with the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (IASH). This fellowship was designed to bring an early-career scholar to Edinburgh for a short research visit, with a view to pursuing interdisciplinary research that tied in with the Centre’s chosen theme. After Rakesh Ankit’s successful residency last year, we’re delighted to announce a second cohort of CSMCH-IASH Fellows; we are especially lucky that, this year, we have been able to fund two fellows.
Our first fellow is Ljubica Spaskovska, who is currently an Associate Research Fellow on the Leverhulme Trust funded project ‘1989 after 1989: Rethinking the Fall of State-Socialism in a Global Perspective’ at the University of Exeter. Ljubica’s research interests are in the political and socio-cultural history of internationalism, including labour, development and histories of generations, providing important new perspectives on the (re) making of anti-imperial Europe and approaches to European – Global South relations. This work led to her first book, entitled The Last Yugoslav Generation: The Rethinking of Youth Politics and Cultures in Late Socialism (Manchester University Press, 2017).
Ljubica will be in residence from 1 March to 31 May. During this time, she will be working on a project entitled ‘Comrades, Guerillas, Diplomats: Yugoslavia, Non-Alignment and the Quest for a New International Order, 1930-1990’ which will form part of her second monograph under consideration with Cambridge University Press. After the fellowship, she will return to Exeter, where she will be taking up a permanent Lectureship in Post-1900 European History. Her mentor at Edinburgh will be Emile Chabal.
Our second fellow is Claudia Stern, who has just finished a Minerva Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Latin American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Originally from Chile, Dr. Stern completed her BA studies at Universidad Diego Portales in Social Communication and Advertising, and also holds a diploma in Cultural Administration from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She then went to Tel Aviv University for an MA in Cultural Studies and a PhD in History. She was subsequently a postdoc at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Research (IPAZ) at Granada University in 2016.
Claudia will also be in residence from 1 March to 31 May, during which time she will be working on the relationship between the experience of the Chilean middle class, gendered identities, and trauma from an economic, urban and political viewpoint. While in residence, she will pursue these interests by studying class identity and its social territorialization in Chile, as well as the ways in which urban icons impacted and shaped individual and national identities. She will also explain how public spaces played a key role as rupture markers in reshaping identities after the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Her aim is to explain the transformation of Chilean middle classes identities through urban transformation as a class indicator. Her mentor at Edinburgh will be Jake Blanc.
As you can imagine, we are very excited to have two such talented scholars working with us at the CSMCH. I am sure you will join me in welcoming them to our community – and I would urge you to come along to listen to their respective presentations to the CSMCH seminar in late April and early May.
NB. For those interested in applying for next year’s CSMCH-IASH Fellowship scheme, the closing date is 30 April 2019. The application website has full details.
— Emile