Spring 2019 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, English
Born and raised in the Republic of Macedonia, Bojan Srbinovski is a graduate student in Cornell’s English department. He also holds a B.A. in English from Stanford University. He writes about 18th- and 19th-century British literature, with a focus on Romanticism. His interests include the novel, the ballad, the urban broadside, aesthetic theory, 19th-century photography, trauma, and the Frankfurt School. His dissertation coordinates a number of central works of Romantic and Victorian literature around the term catastrophe, which belongs both to the language of traumatic collapse and to the language of dramatic upheaval. Srbinovski's project for the Urban Representation Lab absorbs his thinking about catastrophe to make an argument about a different historical and political phenomenon — the renovation of the city of Skopje, Macedonia, under the name “Skopje 2014.” The project traces the emergence of an aesthetic of anticomania as a central tactic of authoritarian nation-building in Macedonia, and the resultant radical transformation of the landscape of the city of Skopje.