Ivana Mihaela Žimbrek; Visiting Fellowship 2022/23
I am a PhD candidate at the Department of History at Central European University, Budapest/Vienna, where I am working on my dissertation on the history of department stores in Socialist Yugoslavia. By applying a pan-Yugoslav, transnational, and gender perspective, I am exploring how different expert communities planned the modernization of retail and urban space under Yugoslav self-managed socialism from the late 1950s to the late 1980s. My research interests include urban, expert, labor, women’s and gender, and transnational history of state-socialism in Central and Southeastern Europe. Recently I have been a visiting researcher at the University of Belgrade, Serbia (CEEPUS research grant) and at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw (COST Action WORCK mobility grant).
Visiting Fellowship April-June 2022
During my stay at INZ in the framework of the Erasmus+ Internship Mobility Program, under the guidance of research fellow Dr. Nina Vodopivec I will explore primary and secondary materials on several case-studies relevant for my dissertation. These include (1) the documentation of state-socialist women’s organizations in Slovenia, whose activities in the sphere of home economics set the foundations for the emergence of modern retail systems and spaces in Socialist Yugoslavia in the late 1950s; and (2) the documentation of the Slovenian architect Lidija Podbregar-Vasle, who was one of the main experts in designing and producing expert knowledge on supermarkets and department stores in Yugoslavia the 1950s and 1960s. This research is also part of a cooperation with research assistant Isidora Grubački for a panel presentation at ASEEES 2022 co-organized under the COST Action WORCK working group “Intersecting Marginalities.” At the end of my stay, I will also take part at the Institute's festival History on the Edge with a lecture titled “Women’s Organizations, Home Economics, and the Beginnings of Modern Retail in Socialist Yugoslavia, 1950s-1960s.”
Publications
"Book Review: Gender, Generations, and Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond. Artwińska, Anna, and Mrozik, Agnieszka, eds." East Central Europe 48, 1 (2021): 132-138
"Book Review: Coca-Cola Socialism: Americanization of Yugoslav Culture in the Sixties. By Radina Vučetić. Translated by John K. Cox." Hungarian Historical Review 8, 1 (2019): 251-253
"The Unrealized Department Store "Na-Ma" in Trnje: Ambitions and Challenges in Expanding the Retail Network and Creating the Urban Space in Zagreb in the Early 1960s." Peristil: Scholarly Journal of Art History 61, 1 (2018): 213-227
