Minja Bujaković, PhD

Independent Researcher, Madrid, Spain

Minja Bujaković is a historian of transnational left-wing women’s activism and organising in the interwar period. She completed her PhD in History at the European University Institute in Florence in June 2026 with a dissertation titled “Beyond the Shadow of the Comintern: The Communist Women’s Movement in the Interwar Period (1920–1935)”, supervised by Benno Gammerl and Glenda Sluga. The thesis examines the Communist Women’s Movement as a transnational network formation, shaped in equal measure by its activists and by the institutional frameworks within which they operated. Her research traces the transnational networks through which women activists collaborated, the ideas and practices they exchanged across borders, and the political strategies they developed. A recurring concern of her work is continuity in left-wing women’s organising through organisational and personal ties, that persisted when institutions and organisations failed. Her current research agenda extends this to communist women’s engagement with anti-fascism, and to the wider women’s antifascist movements of the 1930s. Her interests lie at the intersection of labour, intellectual, and women’s and gender history with digital humanities. She combines Historical Network Research (HNR) and prosopography to recover the long-term relational, organisational, affective and intellectual continuities of left-wing women’s activism.

Statement of interest:

Two of INZ’s current projects, together with its Digital Humanities programme, intersect directly with my research and with the direction I want to take it next.

“Toward an Integrative Approach to Women’s Political Thought in East Central Europe” speaks to the central move of my dissertation: reading communist women as political thinkers in their own right rather than as auxiliary actors within male-dominated organisations. Here I would hope to work with Isidora Grubački on communist women’s antifascist thought. “Being European and Decolonial: Utopian Realism of Yugoslav Non-Aligned Internationalism” meets my continuing interest in transnational left-wing women’s networks and the continuities that carried them across the mid-century. Agustín Cosovschi’s approach to the history of social movements coincides with my own: a combination of historical network research and prosopography that seeks to grasp movement dynamics both structurally and through the actors who sustained them.

At INZ’s Digital Humanities centre I would seek advice on extending this work into an online relational database that makes women’s political networks traceable and accessible beyond academia.