Jelena Diab Golubović is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at Northeastern University. Before joining Northeastern, she was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at The Fletcher School of Global Affairs at Tufts University. She is an interdisciplinary researcher with a PhD in Anthropology and a BA in International Studies from Simon Fraser University, and an MA in Sociology from York University.

Her research is ethnographically grounded in the former Yugoslavia, where she explores themes of violence, intimacy, victimhood, and contamination. Her first book, Inner Zone: The Untold Violence of Retribution in Besieged Sarajevo, is forthcoming in early 2026 with The University of Pennsylvania Press. It is based on her dissertation, which was awarded a Dean’s Convocation Medal from Simon Fraser University. Her next major research project explores extractivism and the violence of green transition in Serbia.

Her research has been published in Journal of Refugee Studies, Anthropological Quarterly, Ethnicities, and American Ethnologist, and has received awards from the International Studies Association, the American Anthropological Association, the American Sociological Association, the Association for the Study of Nationalities, the Canadian Historical Association, and the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies.

NEWS

  • I joined the Research Cluster on Identity Politics at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
  • I was named a 2024–2025 Faculty Fellow at The Humanities Center at Northeastern University, working on the theme of “Erasure”
  • I gave a talk at York University’s “Unsettling Anthropology” speaker series.
  • My co-authors and I received the 2023 honorable mention for the American Anthropology Association’s GAD Prize for Exemplary Cross-Field Scholarship
  • I received the 2023 Early Career Researcher Prize from the Journal of Refugee Studies
  • I received the 2022 Article Prize from the Canadian Historical Association’s Committee on Migration, Ethnicity and Transnationalism (CCMET)
  • I won the 2022 Best Article Award from the International Studies Association (ISA) section on Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies (ENMISA)
  • I received the 2022 Postgraduate Article Prize from the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES).
  • I received the 2021 Article Prize from the BASEES Women’s Forum.
  • I received an honourable mention for the 2021 Postgraduate Prize from BASEES.
  • I received the 2020 Best Article Award from the International Studies Association (ISA) section on Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies (ENMISA).
  • I was named as 1 of 10 winners of the 2020 Global Affairs Canada / SSHRC International Policy Ideas Challenge.
  • I received the Honourable Mention for the 2020 Outstanding Published Article Award from the American Sociological Association (ASA) section on Peace, War, and Social Conflict (PWSC)