BB:What Can River Stories from Austria and the Balkans Teach us about Moments of Crisis?
The project “Rivers in Crisis” (HERA/FWF) investigates how Austrian and (ex)-Yugoslav literature and film from the First World War until today relate to ecological, economic and political crises through the motif of rivers that connect the Western Balkans with Austria. Due to their function as liminal contact points for different linguistic, ethnic, and religious populations, the Danube, Drava, Sava and Drina rivers have served as crucial identifiers for collective belonging and national heritage for centuries. They have figured both as background sites and agentic forces in complex regional power dynamics, in which notions of purity and ownership are consistently pitted against the hybridity and transnationality of these natural spaces. This talk explores case studies of river narratives related to the Danube and the Sava rivers from contemporary literature and film, and shows how they challenge binary human-nature relationships, while also using crisis moments as catalysts for individual and collective transformation and resilience.
Yvonne Živković is a Senior Postdoc at the Institute for Slavic Studies at the University of Graz and PI of the Rivers in Crisis project working on German and Slavic literature. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Columbia University and has taught at Columbia University, the University of Cambridge, University College London, and the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.
Stefanie Populorum is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Graz. She has established an interdisciplinary profile bridging the humanities and economics, grounded in a PhD in German Studies from Rutgers University and Master’s degrees in International Management and Business Administration with a focus on environmental management. For her dissertation on the theory of capitalism in Austrian literature and film of the interwar period she received the International Wendelin Schmid-Dengler Award from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research.