My name is Alexander, and I am excited to join Oxford's REES program. Though born and raised in Germany, my family is originally from the United States and former Yugoslavia, which is why I speak German, English, and Serbo-Croatian. I received my undergraduate degree in East Asian and Japanese Studies from the University of Tokyo in Japan having written my dissertation on the intersection of Japanese and Chinese monetary lending in Southeast Asia.
Here at Oxford, I am investigating the creation of a collective memory of the 1999 NATO Intervention in the post-1999 generation of Serbia. Acting as a watershed moment for Yugoslav and Serbian politics as well as international relations, the NATO intervention has become a political paradigm used to justify Serbia's position and identity in Europe vis-a-vis Russia and the United States. As popular research overwhelmingly focuses on transitional justice and longitudinal studies from an elite-driven, top-down approach, I anticipate looking at the generation of collective memory from a bottom-up perspective and finding some answers to the complex question of how the generation born after acquired and utilizes the memories of the 1999 NATO Intervention.