Jelena Golubović
Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and International Affairs
Jelena Golubović explores hidden geographies of political violence in the former Yugoslavia. Before joining Northeastern, she held a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at The Fletcher School of Global Affairs at Tufts University. Her award-winning research has been published in Journal of Refugee Studies, Ethnicities, Anthropological Quarterly, Focaal, and American Ethnologist. Her first book, Inner Zone: The Untold Violence of Retribution in Besieged Sarajevo (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026) traces a silenced history of retribution that unfolded inside the emblematic siege of Sarajevo. Centering the unheard voices of Bosnian Serb women who lived through the siege, Inner Zone offers a new approach to telling contentious and asymmetrical histories of war. Her new line of research re-orients towards the lithium rush in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia, exploring the violence of green transition in post-war terrain.
- ENMISA Emerging Scholar Award, International Studies Association, 2026
- Early Career Researcher Prize, Journal of Refugee Studies, 2023
- Article Prize, Canadian Historical Association, CCMET, 2022
- Postgraduate Article Prize, BASEES, 2022
- ENMISA Best Article Award, International Studies Association, 2022
- ENMISA Best Article Award, International Studies Association, 2021
- Outstanding Published Article Award, American Sociological Association, AMSS, 2021
- Article Prize, BASEES Women’s Forum, 2021
- Golubović, Jelena. 2026. Inner Zone: The Untold Violence of Retribution in Besieged Sarajevo. University of Pennsylvania Press.
- Golubović, Jelena. (Forthcoming 2026). “Monumental Silence: War Commemoration as Erasure.” Focaal.
- Golubović, Jelena. 2022. “Beyond Agency as Good: Complicity and Displacement after the Siege of Sarajevo.” Journal of Refugee Studies 35(3): 1344–1363. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feab096
- Golubović, Jelena. 2020. “‘To Me, You Are Not a Serb’: Ethnicity, Ambiguity, and Anxiety in Post-War Sarajevo.” Ethnicities 20(3): 544–563. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796819873141
- Golubović, Jelena. 2019. “‘One Day I Will Tell This to My Daughter’: Serb Women, Silence, and the Politics of Victimhood in Sarajevo.” Anthropological Quarterly 92(4): 1173–1199. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2019.0065
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Education
PhD, Anthropology
Simon Fraser University, 2021 -
Contact
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Address
Renaissance Park 937
360 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115 -
Office Hours
Wednesdays 11am–12:20pm
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Peoples and Cultures
ANTH 1101
Surveys basic concepts in cultural anthropology by looking at a range of societies and the issues they face in a globalizing world. Examines the manner in which cultures adapt to, reject, or modify all of the changes they face. These changes impact everything from traditional family structure, to religion, gender, all the way to patterns of joking and concepts of beauty the world over.
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Security, Culture, Power
INTL 3450
Offers a critical and interdisciplinary approach to the study of security. Analyzes the politics, culture, geography, and history of security as a major force shaping the contemporary world. Aims to develop a critical analysis of how power operates in and through security by examining questions of how security shapes cities, states, space, and society from the cultural and psychological terrain of fear to the international terrain of war, capitalism, migration, and transnational conflicts.
Anthropology of Eastern Europe
ANTH 4210
Explores the societies, cultures, and politics of Eastern Europe, focusing on social upheaval and cultural change after the fall of state socialism. Examines themes including capitalist transition, European integration, ethnic and religious conflict, nation-building, and state contestation, maintaining a focus on the everyday realities of Eastern Europeans. Covers key theoretical debates about East-West geopolitical polarity, drawing on decolonial and postcolonial perspectives to challenge representations of Eastern Europe as transitional, peripheral, or backwards.
