Larisa Kurtović

I am an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies at the University of Ottawa. I earned my Ph.D. and MA in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. My undergraduate studies took place at DePaul University in Chicago in the Department of International Studies, where I also taught as an Adjunct Professor between 2012 and 2014. Prior to coming to the University of Ottawa, I spent a year at Cornell University as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Mellon-Sawyer seminar on “Political Will.”

My research is located at the intersection of political anthropology, postsocialist studies, and contemporary social and political theory. Over the last decade, I have been conducting multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina, primarily among political activists, local community leaders, and labor organizers. My inquiries trace emergent forms of political thinking and action that arise in response to the pitfalls of internationally sponsored democratization and expectations forged during Yugoslav socialism. I am currently writing a book about these themes entitled Future as Predicament: Bosnia-Herzegovina and Political Life After Catastrophe. My postdoctoral research has been exploring the mutual entanglement of Bosnia’s postwar economic collapse, affective histories of socialist labor and shifting forms of popular political engagement. Those labors have led to an exciting collaborative research project focused on the story of the reclaimed Bosnian detergent factory “Dita” in the city of Tuzla. Together with anthropologist Andrew Gilbert and Sarajevo-based, graphic artist, Boris Stapić, I am currently working on an illustrated, graphic ethnography about the workers’ struggle to save their factory nearly destroyed by postwar privatization. My latest research project, entitled “Watersheds” examines the political life of infrastructure and water in postwar Sarajevo.

My research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council (IDRF), International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX-IARO and Short Term Grants Program), Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, among others. In addition to the above-mentioned projects, I write on popular culture, visual media, nationalist politics, political patronage and the history of ethnology in the Balkans. For further information, check out my “Current research,” “Publications” and “Teaching.”