Nikoleta (Nika) Sremac is a third-year Ph.D. Student in the Department of Sociology. She received her BA in Political Science – International Relations from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her research focuses on the intersections of gender, culture, politics, and collective memory of mass violence in the U.S. and the Balkans. She is interested in the role of cultural production and political activism in processing past violence in the service of post-conflict reconciliation. 

Originally from ex-Yugoslavia, Nikoleta’s family immigrated to Amherst, Massachusetts in 1995 during the Yugoslav Wars. After finishing college, she spent a year serving in a refugee resettlement agency in Worcester, MA. She then held positions at the Consortium on Gender, Security, and Human Rights in Boston and at Harvard University in Cambridge before beginning her graduate career at the University of Minnesota.

Nikoleta currently works as a Research Assistant with Joachim Savelsberg on a project that seeks to understand the role of gender in the establishment of collective memory around the Yugoslav Wars, funded by the UMN Human Rights Initiative (HRI). She also works as a Research Assistant with Joachim Savelsberg and Alejandro Baer on a project investigating the role of digital memory activism in constructing genocide narratives in Serbia. 

She will be conducting fieldwork abroad in Belgrade, Serbia for the fall semester of the 2021-22 academic year. In addition to her research, Nikoleta serves as a member of the graduate editorial board for The Society Pages and as Associate Director of Grants for the Council of Graduate Students (COGS).