Biography

Prior to becoming a Max Weber Fellow I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where I completed my dissertation titled ‘Becoming Mixed: The Mixed Marriages of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Creation of Ethnic Difference’, under the mentorship of Professor Maria Todorova.
In my dissertation I explore how the interwar Islamic elites imagined a national identity and I argue that ordinary Bosnians reacted to the imposition of such identity with ambivalence, indifference and hostility. I also argue that the Yugoslav Communist regime retreated from politicizing mixed marriage, a policy that was at odds with the emergence of Yugoslav national identity in the everyday life of mixed marriages. I claim that this failure of imagination on the part of the Communist regime made it that much easier for nationalists to stigmatize mixed marriage during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
I graduated summa cum laude from Bellarmine University (Louisville, KY) with a B.A. in History. As an undergraduate I also spent a semester as a visiting student at Oxford University and a summer at Cambridge University in England.
My research interests include the role of religion in the emergence of nations, the interaction of non-elites with national identity, the phenomenon of post-socialist nostalgia, and the use of autobiography in the study of history.