Iva Lucic

About me

I am a historian, with a focus on modern South-eastern and East Central Europe, and a former opera singer. I earned my PhD in history at Uppsala University in 2016. Since 2021 I am Associate Professor of history (docent)  at Stockholm University. In 2022 I was appointed a Pro Futura Scientia Scholar at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies. Since 2023 I am an elected member of the Young Academy of Sweden. 

My current work examines the making of extractive peripheries in the Balkans, focusing on forest extraction between 1870–1990. The project explores multiple peripheralization processes of one region under a variety of shifting polities. I analyze the dynamics of forest extraction and timber export in Bosnia, throughout different political regimes and in the transfer of power from the Ottoman Empire to the Habsburg Empire, and in the consequences of post-imperial state formations and the communist regime of Socialist Yugoslavia. The continuities and changes in the extraction dynamics are explored through the application of the concept of timber colonialism. The concept pivots around four conditioning factors: political governance, global markets and consumption, environmental change, and local social circumstances. The project strives to analytically locate the Balkans within a global net of socio-economic and ecological entanglements.

My first book, In Namen der Nation: Der politische Aufwertungsprozess der Muslime im sozialistichen Jugoslawien (1956-1971), based on my dissertation, was published in 2016 as with Acta Universitatis Upsalienis (Studia Historica Upsaliensia, Bd. 256). It was awarded the Westin prize by the Royal Society of the Humanities at Uppsala and the Fritz Exner Prize by the Südosteuropa Gesellschaft in Munich. It explores the dynamics of the political process of political elevation of Muslims in Socialist Yugoslavia.  The book combines political, economic, legal, and cultural history of Socialist Yugoslavia in order to illuminate the mobilization process that led to a change of political perception of Muslims from a religious group to a nation. The research draws in particular on archival sources and internal documents of the League of Communists in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Yugoslavia and public debates concerning Muslim (national) identity in the media. In addition to historical materials, I conducted interviews with former party members and intellectuals that had been involved in the process of “national recognition of Muslims”. In my work I argue that the political elevation of Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina was the result of a mobilization process beginning in the 1950s.  It was driven by the League of Communists of Bosnia and Herzegovina in service of the affirmation of Bosnian statehood in the wake of the decentralization of Yugoslav federation and the political devaluation of the Yugoslav identity. The Bosnian political cadre tried to promote Bosnia and Herzegovina as a unique and multinational republic, whose political subjectivity was built around a tripartite national structure, made up of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. 

Second edition of "Im Namen der Nation" was published in 2018 with Harrassowitz Verlag in Germany. In 2023 the book was translated into Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and published with University Press in Sarajevo. 

My second monograph (published in 2019 with Anton Pustet Verlag) was on the founding of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holiest Eucharist during the Interwar Period in the bishopric of Litomĕřice (Leitmeritz), in present-day Czech Republic. As part of this project I analyzed continuities and ruptures of religiousity as a social practice among Catholics in Bohemia, after the break-up of the Habsburg Monarchy and the role of women in the Catholic Church prior to the Second Vatican Council. The research is based on ego documents of Ada Chotek, the founder of the congregation as well as official documents of the bishopric Litomĕřice.