Prof. Ana Antić

Professor of European History and Medical Humanities, Head of Centre for Culture and the Mind
University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Visiting Fellowship 2025/26 (August 30, 2026 – September 30, 2026)

I am a social and cultural historian whose research focuses on the history of modern Europe and its global connections, the history of war and violence, and the history of the ‘psy’ sciences. I received my PhD in modern European history at Columbia in 2012, and, before joining the University of Copenhagen in 2020, I worked at several UK and US universities. I have authored two monographs, Therapeutic Fascism: Experiencing the Violence of the Nazi New Order (OUP 2017), and Non-aligned Psychiatry in the Cold War (Palgrave Macmillan 2022), and I am currently completing the third one, Schizophrenia, ‘primitivism’ and modernity: Reimagining the twentieth century (under contract with MIT University Press). My research interests revolve around the relationship between psychiatry, politics, and violence, as well as the decolonisation of psychiatric practices and concepts in the second half of the 20th century. I am currently heading a DNRF Centre for Culture and the Mind (CULTMIND), and an ERC Starting Grant project ‘Decolonising madness: Transcultural psychiatry, international order and the birth of a “global psyche”’.

Statement of interest

I believe the Institute will provide an inspiring and productive environment for developing my project, which focuses on languages of suffering, distress, and recovery in Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe since the end of the Second World War until the present day. This research aims to combine cultural and social history, history of everyday life, and psychiatric history in order to explore how vastly traumatic events such as mass violence, genocide, extreme political disruption, and social dislocation were experienced, processed, and (re)interpreted in this region outside the broader framework of psychological trauma. This framework was arguably significantly less influential in Eastern Europe, and it interacted in complex ways with the broader context of socialist revolution and victory and its public discourses and expectations. Instead of searching for trauma or assuming that its expressions were forcibly suppressed, the project will investigate how distressing experiences were narrated, reframed and commemorated in artistic and cultural production, in everyday lives and practices of different social groups (such as war veterans, children affected by the war, wartime collaborators, political dissidents who were often exposed to further oppression, etc.), and in psychiatric clinics. The project thus aims to develop a deeper insight into how the most disruptive and lethal events of the second half of the twentieth century affected Yugoslavs, their understandings of psychological pain and resilience, and their relationship to broader political projects and collective identities.  The project raises important questions about these experiences and whether they point to alternative philosophies of the mind, self, and suffering.

I intend to use my stay at the Institute of Contemporary History to conduct relevant research related to Slovenian experiences in the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia and the National and University Library, as well as to conduct oral interviews with Slovenian mental health practitioners who were involved in different projects of postwar recovery. At the same time, I hope to use this time to develop further collaborations with the Institute and its staff members interested in histories of the mind and psy disciplines. The aim is to use the visiting fellowship to establish permanent research links by collaborating on shared research applications and to develop plans for co-writing research articles. Moreover, I hope to establish more formal collaboration between the Institute and CULTMIND, and to explore opportunities for institutional funding and exchange.

Selected publications

• Therapeutic Fascism: Experiencing the violence of the Nazi New Order in Yugoslavia (Oxford University Press, 2017)
• Non-aligned psychiatry in the Cold War: Revolution, emancipation and re-imagining the human psyche, (Palgrave Macmillan, Mental Health in Historical Perspective, 2022)
• “’War Trauma’ and the Politics of PTSD during and after the Wars of Yugoslav Succession”, Central European History, 55:2, 2022
• “Decolonising madness? Transcultural psychiatry and birth of a ‘global psyche’ in the aftermath of WWII”, Journal of Global History, 17:1, 2022
• “Transcultural psychiatry: Social psychiatry, cultural difference and universalism in the age of decolonisation”, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 45:3, September 2021