Tijana Matijević

Dr Tijana Matijević

Small Group Project 2025-26

Fiction as Memory Work: Youth Engagement with Yugoslav Wars Through Literary Fiction

With Rodoljub Jovanović & Milica Resanović

This project investigates the role of literary fiction in shaping collective memories of the 1990s among young readers in Serbia, focusing on youth born after 2000 who lack personal memories of the breakup of Yugoslavia and the wars in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo. It investigates how literature contributes to their understanding and emotional engagement with this historical period, addressing broader theoretical questions about the transfer of historical knowledge. The study considers fiction as an alternative source of memory, recognizing that collective memory extends beyond formal historiography and textbooks, which is a topic that has been quite extensively researched. It examines how fiction integrates data, insights, and emotions, emphasizing the capacity to understand wrongdoing and suffering.

More information

Areas of interest

Literary Theory Former Yugoslavia Feminism World Literature Slavic Studies Culture Eastern Europe Balkans Aesthetics

Cohort

FG11

Biography

Tijana Matijević is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade.

After graduating in literary studies in Belgrade and Eastern European studies in Bologna, Tijana Matijević did her PhD at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg with the thesis From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent: A Feminist Reading of Post-Yugoslav Literature (transcript 2020). Until 2023 Matijević was a teacher and a research associate at the Slavonic Studies departments of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. She explores continuities among Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literatures and cultures, issues of aesthetic and ideology, alternative (avant-garde, feminist, left) history. She translates (Hunde und Andere, with Marie Alpermann, eta 2023), writes literary critique and since 2022 is the jury member of the literary award Biljana Jovanović.

Biographical details correct as of 26.06.25