James M. Robertson
Assistant Professor, History
School of Humanities
School of Humanities
Ph.D., New York University, 2014, History
B.A., University of Sydney, 2007, History & Philosophy
B.A., University of Sydney, 2007, History & Philosophy
University of California, Irvine
263 Murray Krieger Hall
Mail Code: 3275
Irvine, CA 92697
263 Murray Krieger Hall
Mail Code: 3275
Irvine, CA 92697
Research Interests
Eastern Europe and the Balkans; intellectual and cultural history; political geography; global history of socialism and communism; political theologies.
Research Abstract
I am an intellectual historian of Eastern Europe who primarily studies the history of concepts that bring together modern understandings of politics, aesthetics and geography.
My current book project examines the cultural politics of supranationalism in the intellectual history of Yugoslav socialism over the long twentieth century. From its emergence in the 1870s through to the civil wars of the 1990s, Yugoslav socialism was animated by various projects of supranational unification: from regional projects of Balkan or Yugoslav federalism to larger spatial visions of European unification, communist pan-Slavism or the more ambitious Non-Aligned Movement. My book excavates the ways radical intellectuals mapped the political and cultural geographies of these projects in response to the shifting spatial dynamics of globalization. In doing so it demonstrates how capitalist processes of global spatial integration and differentiation generated new modes of human experience and conditioned the formation of modern radical thought.
In addition to this project, I am researching a history of the intellectual entanglements of Catholic and communist philosophies in South East Europe, looking particularly at the Slovene thinker, Edvard Kocbek. This book tracks the history of the reception of Catholic, Marxist and phenomenological ideas to the lands of Yugoslavia and examines their intellectual convergence in the interwar period. In doing so it interrogates theories of secularization and theorizes the possible politico-theological dimensions of communist thought.
Alongside these books I am also engaged in two long-term projects. The first is a global history of communism as a mode of world-building. The second, a conceptual history of violence and its aestheticization in extreme metal music.
My current book project examines the cultural politics of supranationalism in the intellectual history of Yugoslav socialism over the long twentieth century. From its emergence in the 1870s through to the civil wars of the 1990s, Yugoslav socialism was animated by various projects of supranational unification: from regional projects of Balkan or Yugoslav federalism to larger spatial visions of European unification, communist pan-Slavism or the more ambitious Non-Aligned Movement. My book excavates the ways radical intellectuals mapped the political and cultural geographies of these projects in response to the shifting spatial dynamics of globalization. In doing so it demonstrates how capitalist processes of global spatial integration and differentiation generated new modes of human experience and conditioned the formation of modern radical thought.
In addition to this project, I am researching a history of the intellectual entanglements of Catholic and communist philosophies in South East Europe, looking particularly at the Slovene thinker, Edvard Kocbek. This book tracks the history of the reception of Catholic, Marxist and phenomenological ideas to the lands of Yugoslavia and examines their intellectual convergence in the interwar period. In doing so it interrogates theories of secularization and theorizes the possible politico-theological dimensions of communist thought.
Alongside these books I am also engaged in two long-term projects. The first is a global history of communism as a mode of world-building. The second, a conceptual history of violence and its aestheticization in extreme metal music.
Publications
‘Edvard Kocbek, embodiment, and a personalist rapprochement with communism,’ in Christian modernity and Marxist secularism in East Central Europe: between conflict and cooperation (Zagreb: Srednja Evropa, 2022).
‘Small socialism: the scales of self-management culture in postwar Yugoslavia,’ Slavic Review 80:3 (Fall 2021): 563-584.
‘Navigating the postwar liberal order: autonomy, creativity and modernism in socialist Yugoslavia, 1949-53,’ Modern Intellectual History 17:2 (June 2020): 385-412.
‘Communism as religious phenomenon: phenomenology and Catholic socialism in Yugoslav Slovenia, 1927-1942’, Journal of the History of Ideas 81:2 (April 2020): 279-301.
‘Dispatches from the appendix of Europe: Miroslav Krleža’s abject modernism’, Papers on Language and Literature 55:3 (2019): 227-255.
‘Literature, revolution and national aesthetics on the interwar Yugoslav left’, Nationalities Papers 46:2 (2018): 301-317.
‘Imagining the Balkans as a space of revolution: the federalist vision of Serbian socialism, 1870-1914’, East European Politics and Societies 31:2 (2017): 402-425.
‘Speaking Titoism: Student opposition and the Yugoslav socialist language regime, 1961-1974’, in Petrov, Petre and Ryazanova, Lara, eds., Vernaculars of communism: language, ideology and power in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 2015)
Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=6439
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=6439
Last updated
05/24/2023
05/24/2023