Jovana Vukcevic is currently engaged as a Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher in the urbanHIST programme (studying in Slovakia, France, Spain and Italy), where she develops a research project on commodification and disneyfication of uncomfortable heritage of totalitarian regimes in Europe. Previously, she held the positions of teaching assistant at the University of Montenegro, researcher at the Leipzig Graduate School Global and Area studies, start-up scholar at the Bielefeld University and ZEIT Stiftung’s pre-doctoral fellow. She obtained her Erasmus Mundus Master degree from Charles University of Prague and EHESS Paris in the field of European studies, defending with honours her thesis “Commodification of the collective memory: Yugonostalgia as a marketing strategy”. She also holds a BA in Economics from University of Montenegro and an MA in Management from University of Nice. She presented her research papers at academic conferences in Berlin, Dakar, Dublin, Paris, Florence, Munich, Warsaw, etc. and participated in a number of European trainings and programs in the field of academia, youth development and media. During the past years, she was awarded a number of grants, prizes and scholarships from several prestigious institutions and projects, such as the French Government, ZEIT-Stiftung, Forum Alpbach, COST action, Erasmus Mundus, Horizon 2020, etc. She has already published articles in several international journals, conference proceedings and collective volumes on the topics of collective memory, heritage management, reconciliation, rural tourism and entrepreneurship. Her main research interests relate to the heritage and memory management, post-socialist urban and cultural transformations, dark tourism, as well as the public uses of history and institutionalisations of memory. Other than her research activities, Vukcevic is very active in the field of modernization of higher education in the Western Balkans, as a regional representative of the Western Balkans Alumni Association, working closely with the European Commission and higher education institutions from the region.
