The slogan Balkans to the peoples of the Balkans summarizes the struggle of both South Slavic and non-Slavic nations to liberate themselves from political tutelage and colonial legacies. The philology of the Slavic Adriatic, as a forgotten bequest of the renowned Croatian linguist Petar Skok, and Balkanology, as a comparatist philological discipline established by Petar Skok and Serbian Classical philologist Milan Budimir, both served as the intellectual underpinning of the proto-decolonial endeavours in interwar Yugoslavia. This presentation aims to 1) reconstruct Skok's and Budimir's distinctive understanding of the Balkans and Adriatic as liminal spaces; 2) explore the link between acknowledging liminality, as an asset in creating political communities rooted in plurilingualism, religious tolerance, and multiethnicity, and refuting imperialist imageries of the Balkans.
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Jelena Lalatović (Belgrade, 1994) is a researcher in cultural and literary studies. She earned her PhD in literary theory in 2023 at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, with a dissertation later published as Tako se kalio čelik: omladinska štampa i borba za slobodni univerzitet, 1937–1968 (2023). From May 2018 to March 2025, she worked in the Department of Periodical Studies at the Institute of Literature and Art in Belgrade, specializing in archival and periodical research. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher on the Liminal Waterways Countercultures project at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Zagreb.
This webinar series presents work in progress from the transnational Liminal Waterway Countercultures research project. The project explores creative alternative ways of life that have emerged in edge spaces around Europe’s peripheral waterways, precariously weathering several interlocking crises. The webinars present our diverse sites, our range of innovative research methods, and our emergent findings. The sessions each last an hour and include 25-minute presentations with time for discussion. All welcome.
The project is funded through the HERA/CHANSE Humanities in Crisis programme by the AHRC, ANR, FCT, FWF and HRZZ. For information and a joining link, see liminalwater.uni-graz.at/en/events/.