Rituals of Resistance: The Liturgical Imagination and the Politics of Protest in Post-Yugoslav Serbia

Join us for a lecture in Miller Hall by ISM assistant professor of liturgical studies Nina Glibetić.

This talk explores liturgy's entanglement with political protest in modern and contemporary Serbia, from demonstrations against Slobodan Milošević in the 1990's to current protests against the current President Aleksandar Vučić. It analyzes how the Serbian Orthodox Church has navigated grassroots opposition to political authority, and how ritual, prayer, liturgical space, and public procession have become technologies for expressing identity, legitimacy, and belonging. The talk contextualizes these developments within liturgy's broad ability to serve as a living medium of political and cultural expression, and the ways in which its enduring presence in the post-Yugoslav Balkans permits its creative mobilization for reshaping memory and the ritual imagination.

Free and open to the public.

This event is part of the ISM Liturgy Symposium Series.

Contact: Katya Vetrov

Bio:

Nina Glibetić is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research draws principally from liturgiology, medieval history, ritual studies, and Byzantine and Slavic studies. She has received several fellowships, including at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Dumbarton Oaks, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music from 2013-14. She currently has an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellowship to work at the University of Regensburg. 

Professor Glibetić has published on a variety of topics, such as the liturgy of early Slavs, the development of eucharistic practices in Byzantium, religious rituals for women at childbirth and miscarriage, and the impact of liturgy on the formation of national identity. Before coming to Notre Dame, she was an assistant professor in liturgical studies at the Catholic University of America. Glibetić is also a member of an international research team supported by the Austrian Science Fund and dedicated to studying the Glagolitic manuscripts discovered at St Catherine’s Monastery on Mt Sinai in 1975. In 2021, Prof. Glibetić was appointed by Pope Francis as consultor to the Dicastery of Oriental Churches, Vatican City. In prior positions, she has taught courses on Liturgy and Culture, Liturgical Methodologies: From Baumstark to Bell, Liturgy and the Female Body, Liturgical History, and Sacred Space and Identity in Jerusalem.