Djordje Popović

Slavic Languages and Literatures

Djordje Popović is Assistant Professor of South Slavic Studies in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. His research and teaching interests include 20th- and 21st-century South Slavic literature, Yugoslav modernism and state socialism, critical theory (Frankfurt School), and intellectual history. His book project, “The Concept of Statelessness in Second-World Literature,” is a comparative study of the mutually constitutive relationship between homelessness as a cultural standpoint and statelessness as a political condition. Focusing on the case of non-aligned Yugoslavia with its state-sponsored modernist aesthetic, Popović examines how the theme of homelessness—once viewed as an expression of cosmopolitan aspirations among its most progressive writers—turns into a devastating everyday reality for those rendered genuinely stateless in the course of the Yugoslav wars. His essays on the appropriation of the dialectical tradition and on the ontologizing of alienation in the western reception of East European modernism have appeared in the journal Contradictions and in History, Imperialism, Critique: New Essays in World Literature (Routledge, 2019). Popović holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota (2019). He joined Berkeley Slavic and became affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory in 2020.