Jelena Diab Golubović is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at Northeastern University. Previously, she was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at The Fletcher School of Global Affairs at Tufts University.

Her research is ethnographically grounded in the former Yugoslavia, where she explores hidden geographies of political violence. Her first book, Inner Zone: The Untold Violence of Retribution in Besieged Sarajevo, is available for pre-order 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 project re-orients toward the lithium rush in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia, exploring the violence of green transition through the lens of infrastructure.

Jelena received the 2026 Emerging Scholar Award from the International Studies Association section on Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies. Her multi-award winning peer-reviewed research has been published or is forthcoming in Journal of Refugee Studies, Anthropological Quarterly, Ethnicities, American Ethnologist, and Focaal.

NEWS

  • I received the 2026 Emerging Scholar Award from the ENMISA section of the International Studies Association.
  • 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)