Sreten Ugricic New Visiting Scholar
Press contact: Donna Urschel (202) 707-1639 Public contact: Jason Steinhauer (202) 707-0213
Sreten UgriÄ ić Appointed Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Kluge Center
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington today announced the appointment of Sreten UgriÄ ić as a distinguished visiting scholar at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. His appointment begins July 1. He will spend four months in residence.
UgriÄ ić served as the director of the National Library of Serbia from 2001 to 2012 and is the author of 10 books of fiction, essays, and theory. His work has been included in anthologies of contemporary Serbian literature and has been translated into English, German, French, Macedonian, and Slovenian.
In January 2012, after publicly supporting the freedom of speech of Montenegrin writer Andrej Nikolaidis, UgriÄ ić was dismissed from the National Library of Serbia. UgriÄ ić was accused of supporting terrorism and went into exile. Since leaving Serbia, UgriÄ ić has held a series of visiting scholar and writer-in-residence appointments in Switzerland, Austria and the United States, most recently as an international visitor at the Stanford Humanities Center, and as visiting scholar at the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Stanford University.
At the Kluge Center, UgriÄ ić will research his current book project, tentatively titled "At Home Abroad." The project will explore ideas of homeless home, artless art, belonging and uprootedness, non-identity, similarity and cross-cultural community. UgriÄ ić said, "Drawing on history, art history, philosophy, literature and literary criticism, it will weave fiction and non-fiction, using personal narratives and interpretations of selected artworks and literary texts, to explore issues of moral and aesthetic responsibility, dignity and indignation, exile and inner emigration, socio-cultural indifference and manipulation, identity politics and the status of imagination, as they relate to contemporary society, especially in Europe and the Balkans." UgriÄ ić will draw on the Library’s rich resources in history and area studies, including sources from the European Division and the general humanities and social sciences collections.
UgriÄ ić is a member of the Serbian PEN Club and co-president of the Selection Committee of the World Digital Library, a project of the Library of Congress with the support of the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO).
Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the world's best thinkers to stimulate and energize one another, to distill wisdom from the Library's rich resources, and to interact with policymakers in Washington. For more information about the Kluge Center visit www.loc.gov/kluge/.
The Library of Congress, the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and the largest library in the world, holds more than 160 million items in various languages, disciplines and formats. The Library serves the U.S. Congress and the nation both on-site in its reading rooms on Capitol Hill and through its award-winning website at www.loc.gov.
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PR 15-114 06/25/15 ISSN 0731-3527
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