The Picturesque Soldier and Mourning Mother: Gender, Memory, and the First World War in Interwar Serbia

This lecture focuses on two types of sources, laments of Serbian women and photographs by Serbian military photographers, as entry points into understanding the private, cultural, and religious arenas of Serbian First World War and interwar remembrances. Drawing on research examining the political uses of lament and grief, the lecture considers the role Serbian women played in controlling and directing the “passion of grief and anger” within their communities as they remembered the dead. The photographic evidence reveals that traditional death rituals and laments were performed and that these rituals were significant socio-political spaces where women, families, and communities of soldiers advanced claims or recognition of their wartime experiences and memories.

Melissa Bokovoy is a professor at the University of New Mexico. She teaches courses on eastern and western Europe in the twentieth century, as well as the western civilization surveys. Her main area of research is the history of the south Slavs (Yugoslavia) in the twentieth century. She has worked primarily on the post World War II period, focusing on the social and political relationships between Yugoslav society and its Communist party-state.