Three academics from KRVS gave a presentation at the University of Copenhagen

Associate Professor Ondřej Žíla, Dr. Karin Hofmeister, and Ph.D. candidate Tomáš Košek attended the seminar Cultural Memory, Conflict and the Post-Yugoslav Space at the University of Copenhagen in late May, where they participated in a panel discussion on memory in the Republika Srpska.

Associate Professor Ondřej Žíla opened the session with a presentation titled Exhuming the Past: The Politics of Relocating the Dead in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which he focused on the postwar tendency of ethnic Serbs to relocate their graves from Sarajevo—a place from which most had left and which had become part of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Karin Hofmeister then presented her research titled Posthumous Movements and Orthodox Memory Work: The Serbian Orthodox Church and the Exodus of the Dead, in which she examined the practice of “reburial” and the relocation of graves in wartime and postwar societies, with an emphasis on the role of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

Finally, doctoral student Tomáš Košek presented his paper Kozara Reframed: Competing Memory Regimes in Exhibition Iterations, in which he examined the World War II memorial at Kozara. In this context, he discussed shifts in the interpretation of World War II in socialist Yugoslavia, in the 1990s, and after 2012, as well as how this institutional transformation relates to local Bosnian Serb memories of the war.