Kearney Public Library and UNK-History Department welcome you to the history brown bag lunch series Wednesday, February 2 from noon-1:00 pm. Dr. Carol Lilly will present “Death and Burial Culture in Socialist Yugoslavia: The Politicization of Cemeteries and Ethnic Conflict in the Balkans”
Beyond serving as memorials to those loved and lost, grave markers and the cemeteries in which they reside may act as powerful sites of ethnoreligious identity. In this presentation she will discuss the politicization of grave markers and cemeteries in postwar Yugoslavia leading to desecrations as a tool within in the Wars of Yugoslav Dissolution from 1991-1999. Violence perpetrated against the dead only served to amplify and intensify violence among the living. Ultimately then, the Communist regime in Yugoslavia not only failed to create its own cemeteries as multiethnic and pluralistic communities of the dead but ensured that those already existing further divided Yugoslavia’s communities of the living.
Carol S. Lilly is Professor of History and Director of International Studies at the University of Nebraska Kearney. She received her Ph.D. in History at Yale University in 1990 and has been employed in the History Department at UNK since 1992 teaching courses in Russian, Soviet, and East European History. Her most recent publications include Death and Burial in Socialist Yugoslavia: The Politicization of Cemeteries and Ethnic Conflict in the Balkans, manuscript forthcoming with Bloomsbury Press.
Mark your calendars for this ongoing series on March 2 with a presentation on “Japanese-Americans in Nebraska by Vickie Schaepler from the Japanese Hall Museum.
This program is free and open to the public so bring your lunch and learn! This collaborative program is presented by UNK-History Department, and the Kearney Public Library.