Please join the Njegos Endowment for Serbian Language and Culture at Columbia University’s East Central European Center and the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Jasmina Luki?, Professor, Department of Gender Studies, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary and Sibelan Forrester, Susan W. Lippincott Professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Russian at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.

This joint lecture by Forrester and Luki? will shed light on the work of Milica Mi?i? Dimovska, one of the first women writers in the Balkan literatures to promote a gender perspective in contemporary fiction of the 1980s and 1990s. An engaging storyteller, exceptional stylist, and sharp observer of social life, Mi?i? Dimovska is also the author of one of the most important novels about the era of Slobodan Miloševi?. She deconstructs the institutional, cultural and media mechanisms of mass self-deception of the part of the Serbian population that supported Miloševi?’s prolonged rule. She unmasks the closed system of destabilization of all possible grounds for safe judgment, which produced a situation in which post-truth was effectively introduced in public spaces.

The 2002 novel Mrena, translated into Englsih by Prof. Forrester as The Cataract, was published in 2016, and it will be promoted at the lecture as an exceptional literary piece and a strong critical text that can speak to a number of comparable situations in today's world.

Sibelan Forrester is Susan W. Lippincott Professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Russian at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. She has published numerous translations of fiction, folktales, poetry, and scholarly prose from Croatian, Russian and Serbian. Her translation of Mi?i? Dimovska's novel THE CATARACT was published in 2016, with an introduction by Jasmina Luki?. 

Jasmina Luki? is Professor of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies with the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University in Budapest.

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