Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: 20th Century Europe, Nationalism, National Identity and Memory, Balkans, Australian Muslim Identity

About Me: Mirela Cufurovic is a Research Associate at Charles Sturt University and a tutor for the Indigenous Tutorial Assistance Scheme at the University of Sydney. She has completed a Bachelor of Political, Economic and Social Sciences and is a History Honours Class I graduate from the University of Sydney. She has also graduated from a Master of Islamic Studies (with Distinction) at Charles Sturt University.

Her Master’s thesis, Negotiating Memory, Identity and Oriental Politics in Australian Sport: The Case of Australian Female Muslim Sports Celebrities, examines how Australian female Muslim sports celebrities negotiate their identity as women, as Muslims, and as sports participants in Australian sport, and how their multiple identities are shaped and reshaped by a collective remembering of them as the ‘unfit-other’ in sport.

Her Honours thesis, The Dilemma of One Nation with Two Names: Alija Izetbegović and the Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) National Question, examines how the Muslim nation of Bosnia-Hercegovina developed a distinct Bosniak identity under the leadership of Alija Izetbegović, from the aftermath of WWII until the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995. It explores how Izetbegović’s political dissent, vis-à-vis the Communist regime, contributed to the rise in Bosniak national consciousness as a result of the dissemination of his manifesto Islamska Deklaracija (1970).

Recent Publications: Cufurovic, Mirela. “Negotiating Memory, Identity and Oriental Politics in Australian Sport: The Case of Australian Female Muslim Sports Celebrities.” International Journal of Sport (2019): (forthcoming).

Cufurovic, Mirela. “Popular Imagination versus Historical Reality: HBO’s Rome and the Practice of History.” Public History Review 25 (2018): 1-11. https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v25i0.6157.

Cufurovic, Mirela. “Fully Known Yet Wholly Unknowable: Orientalising the Balkans.” Australian Journal of Islamic Studies 2, no. 1 (2017): 39-58. https://ajis.com.au/index.php/ajis/article/view/31.

Cufurovic, Mirela. “Legitimizing National Identity through ‘Transnational Existences’: Post-war Kosovo and its Relationship with the European Union, 1998-2008.” Chicago Journal of History, Autumn, no. 7 (2016): 111-118. http://cjh.uchicago.edu/issues/fall16/7.11.pdf.