Slaven Crnić is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project “REVENANT—Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation” (Grant agreement No. 101002908) at the Department of Cultural Studies, University of Rijeka. As part of “REVENANT”, his current research aims to explore the construction, contestation, and revival of (post)imperial places in Yugoslav travel writing. His project focuses on representations of places – such as capitals, ports, and vacation resorts – that once held utmost importance for imperial politics, commerce, and self-image. By examining accounts of Vienna, Budapest, and Istanbul, but also places like Trieste and Opatija in a corpus of scattered texts (from autobiographical notes and memoirs to fully developed travelogues), Slaven’s research interrogates the ways in which a literary collection of places echoes the Yugoslav literati’s broader political and affective reckoning with the lasting legacies of Habsburg and Ottoman Empires.
Before joining “REVENANT”, Slaven was a visiting postdoctoral junior research fellow in the Field of Excellence “Dimensions of Europe”, University of Graz, where he collaborated closely with a group of scholars gathered around the thematic cluster “European Literatures and their Interactions”.
Slaven holds a PhD in Comparative Gender Studies from the Central European University (CEU) in Vienna. His thesis, defended in 2023, explored the poetic construction and narrative significance of normative and non-normative masculinity in canonical Yugoslav historical novels by Ivo Andrić and Meša Selimović. Through the combined theoretical frameworks of masculinity studies, queer and literary theory, the thesis examined the ways in which novelistic depiction of social, political and historical change was hinged upon a variegated portrayal of the dynamics between male homosociality and queerness.
Slaven has previously taught at the Department of Gender Studies (CEU) and the Department of Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (University of Rijeka). He was also a visiting PhD researcher at the Department of Slavonic Studies, University of Vienna. Outside of academia, Slaven has been actively engaged with several feminist, human rights and LGBTIQ+ organizations and initiatives, and has previously been a lecturer in the educational programs at the Center for Women’s Studies (Zagreb), and Zagreb Pride organization.