Office Hours: GISB 4045 on Mondays at noon
Dr. Julija Pešić is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research explores the intersections of performance art, digital media, and cultural memory in post-socialist and global contexts. Grounded in extensive fieldwork, interviews, and multilingual archival research across the former Yugoslav region, her work draws on deep regional expertise and native proficiency in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian.
Pešić holds a PhD in Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies from the University of Toronto and an MA in Comparative South Slavic Literatures, Languages, and the Balkan cultures from the University of Belgrade. Her regional specialization and advanced linguistic training in language pedagogy inform a nuanced understanding of the Balkans’ sociopolitical, media, and cultural dynamics, which she brings to both her research and teaching.
An alumna of Harvard’s Mellon School of Theatre and Performance Research, she also offers a transnational, cross-cultural perspective shaped by academic formation in both North America and Southeastern Europe. Her current monograph in progress, The Cleaning of Marina Abramović: From a Radical Artist to a Global Artworld Celebrity, explores performance as a site of ideological contestation, historical reinvention, and affective labor within the global cultural economy. This work contributes to broader debates on globalization, identity, and the politics of cultural production, advancing conversations by examining how post-socialist artistic radicalism is rebranded through cultural institutions and global celebrity circuits.