Marina Blagojević Hugson, feminist scholar and activist, and a former visiting Professor with the CEU Department of Gender Studies (1998-2001), died in Belgrade on June 6, 2020.
Since the early 1990s, Marina Blagojević was a strong voice on the regional feminist scene, living and working primarily in Belgrade, but also in a number of other countries. Apart from CEU, she was teaching at the Universities of Belgrade, Sarajevo, Hildesheim, as well as at Stephen F. Austin State University in the USA. Her major research interests were Gender and Development, Development of the Semiperiphery, Sociology of Gender, Social Demography, Gender and Knowledge Production, and Balkan Masculinities.
As an activist, she was strongly involved both in the women’s movement and in the peace movement in Serbia, and participated in a number of highly relevant regional initiatives. Among others, she was a co-founder and a Board member of the Women’s Studies Center in Belgrade, a co-founder and a Board member of the Democratic Center Foundation, and a co-organizer of the Conference of women parliamentarians of Southeastern Europe in Budva, Montenegro, 2003.
Marina Blagojević has published more than 100 academic and 20 expert publications, including Produkcija znanja na semiperiferiji - rodna perspektiva [Knowledge Production at The Semi-Periphery: A Gender Perspective] Belgrade 2009; Rodni barometar u Srbiji: razvoj i svakodnevni život [Gender Barometer in Serbia 2012: Development and Everyday Life] (UN WOMEN, Belgrade, 2013); and Transnational Men: Beyond, Between and Within the Nations, NY: Routledge, 2013 (ed. with Jeff Hearn, and Katherine Harrison).
Her devotion to feminism, her personal strength and her creative and intellectual energy will be sorely missed by her colleagues and friends.