Milica Popovic

Dr. Milica Popović is a political scientist, specialized in Memory Studies, Political Sociology and Higher Education Studies. During her bachelor’s studies in law at the University of Belgrade, she worked on the judiciary and rule of law, public administration, and gender equality reforms within international organizations in Serbia, including the American Bar Association/Central European and Eurasian Law Initiatives and the United Nations Development Programme from 2002 to 2009. From 2004 to 2006, Popović was an elected representative of the Students’ Union of Serbia and from 2006 to 2008 in the European Students’ Union in Brussels. Building upon her expertise in the European Higher Education Area, in 2010, Popović was employed as a Higher Education Programme Assistant at Education International in Brussels; since then, she has been working as an independent expert and consultant in higher education and research issues for various clients, including the Council of Europe and the European Commission.

Popović obtained a master’s degree in political science from the University Paris 2 Pantheon-Assas, and in 2012, she was an intern at the National Assembly of the Republic of France in the International Affairs and Defense Office, Department for Interparliamentary Cooperation. She obtained a PhD in Comparative Political Sociology at Sciences Po Paris and in Balkan studies at the University of Ljubljana. In 2015/2016, Popović was an Executive Editor for Le Monde Diplomatique, edition in Serbia.

From 2021 to 2023, Popović has been Postdoctoral Fellow and Project Lead at the Global Observatory on Academic Freedom at Central European University in Vienna, and for her work at CEU she is a recipient of DAAD Fundamental Academic Values Award for Early Career Scientists. Popović also worked as a lecturer at Sciences Po Paris from 2020 to 2022.

Beyond her current research on the Western Balkans and accession to the European Union within the Centre Grande Europe, she finalizes a monograph on Yugonostalgia and the memory narratives of the generation of the last pioneers in the (post)Yugoslav space, and developing a new research project on the memory narratives of deserters in Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. She is fluent in the English, French, and Yugoslav languages (Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian-Montenegrin, with full understanding of Slovenian and Macedonian).