Olivera Jokić
Olivera
Jokic
Associate Professor of English, Director of Gender Studies Program
Phone number
212.237.8566
Room number
NB 7.63.12
Education

Ph.D., University of Michigan

2008, English Language and Literature; Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies
 

B.A., University of Novi Sad

1996, English Language and Literature

 

JJC Affiliations
English Department, Gender Studies, Honors Program
Courses Taught

Migrations: On Moving and Being Moved Writing-intensive capstone in the English major that thinks about what it means to move and be moved in the world as we know it. The course asks what it means to imagine national borders as relevant markers of movement, how modern states (constituted by people who don’t know one another) have become viable communities, and how the idea of moving towards or away from “one’s own people” says something about what others mean to us, how we learn to have feelings, and what kind of world we think we live in.

About Love Writing-intensive senior capstone seminar in English, ‘about love’ and the way it eludes our powers of knowing or control, how it reveals the limits of individualism, and why most discussions of the subject seem either really tacky or really not about love. The course treats love as the abiding interest in other people, and examines the possibility that ‘love’ is one name we now have for a force that both reinforces and breaks social norms and conventions. 

Modern Family (Senior Seminar in Literature) A capstone course for English majors with interests and backgrounds in a variety of literary fields and periods. The organizing concept of the “modern family” invites students to look at the seemingly ‘natural’ or ‘universal’ ideologies and ways of life at historically and culturally contingent. Looking at the relationship between literary representations and ideologies of social structure, students critically investigate notions of identity, difference, intimacy and affect.

Honors Capstone Writing Seminar   Writing workshop for students from a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences completing their theses in the Honors Program. Each student receives detailed feedback from several classmates and the instructor on two drafts of the paper. Class discussions of drafts focus on methodological questions, disciplinary protocols, discilpinary boundaries and collaborations. 

Women and Revolution: Research-Intensive Undergraduate Course   Research-intensive version of the upper-division course on literature of the long nineteenth century focusing on the history of thought and writing about revolutions’ effect on gender politics and ideology. The course requires students to formulate a research project that centers on a primary document they learn about on one of the visits to research libraries in the NYC area.

Revolution! Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century, 1789–1917   Upper-division course on the relationship between literature and social change in the long nineteenth century. The course traces the transformations of nineteenth-century political imagination across literary, philosophical and historiographical texts.

Text and Context: Frankenstein   Introduction to the study of literary texts in the context of their historical conditions and against a range of theoretical approaches to literary criticism, such as biographical, historicist, formalist, psychoanalytic, and feminist.

Research Methodologies Across the Disciplines in Humanities and Social Sciences: About New York City (Honors)  A required course in the Honors Program that familiarizes students with research methodologies in a range of disciplines that concern themselves with the common good. Work in the course involves the design, planning, and execution of a research project about New York City as a laboratory in which to examine the form of and access to the common good.

Literature and Ethics   Upper-division course on literature as a laboratory space for ethical ideas. Using literary and philosophical texts from different historical periods, the course asks students to examine how ethical norms are established, to what degree they are flexible and negotiable, and what conceptual and linguistic tools are available for their examination.   

Literature and Gender   Upper-division course open to students in all majors. This is an intensive introduction to literary analysis of representations of gender, gendered authorship and gendered reading practices. Reading across genres and historical periods, students investigate how arguments about gender in literary texts relate to theoretical and political positions available in other discourses.

Introduction to Gender Studies   An interdisciplinary course using readings from humanities and social sciences to introduce students to the concepts fundamental to the study of gender construction and of the emergence of the category of gender as a focus of political intervention and academic research.

What is Friendship? (Honors Program)   Elective course funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, treating of friendship as a field of knowledge that probes the limits of the modern ideals of individuality, authenticity, self-knowledge and self-determination.

What is Common Good? (Honors Program) A required introductory course in the Honors Program at John Jay College that presents students with a range of philosophical perspectives on the concept of “common good,” the theme of the Program, along with their sociological, ethical, and political implications.

 

Languages
English, French, Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian, Spanish
Scholarly Work

PUBLICATIONS

with Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay, “Archival Lives of Popular Culture: Our Introduction.” The Journal of Popular Culture 53 (2020): 1261-1272.

with Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay, “Archiving popular culture: editors’ introduction.” Archives and Records 41:3 (2020): 209-214.

“Orientalism in Transit: Company Men, Colonial Historiography, and Other Handmaidens of Empire,” in Migration and Modernities: the State of Being Stateless, 1700-1850, ed. JoEllen DeLucia and Juliet Shields, Edinburgh UP (2019), 170–183.

 “No country, no cry: Literature of women’s displacement and the reading of pity,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54 (2018), Special Issue on “Refugee Literature,” 781–794.

 “Pedagogy of the Depressed: Romanticism and the Long Revolution,” Romantic Circles Pedagogy Commons, Special Issue: Teaching Romanticism with the Contemporary, ed. D. B. Ruderman and Rachel Feder (2017)

 “Future in Numbers,” special issue of Common-place on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century 16.3 (2016)

“The Odds and the Ends: What to Do with Some Letters of Catharine Macaulay,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Special Issue on Jane Austen and Her Contemporaries, 56.2 (2015): 209–226.

[with Claire Gallien] “Eighteenth-Century Orientalism in Contemporary British Historiography and Literary Criticism,” Literature Compass 12.4 (2015): 121–133.

“Sentimental Documentation: Writing the Empire of Feeling in Memoirs of Asiaticus,” in Intermediaires culturels/Cultural Intermediaries, Études internationales sur le dix-huitième siècle/International Eighteenth-Century Studies Series. Ed. Ellen Welch and Vanessa Alayrac. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014. 259–282.

“Teaching to the Resistance: What to Do When Students Dislike Austen,” Persuasions On-Line, Special Issue on Jane Austen and Pedagogy 34.2 (2014)

“Death of a Beautiful Moor Woman: Obstinate Clerks and the Form of Evidence in the British Colonial Archive,” Essays in Romanticism 19 (2012): 83–102.

“She Comes to Look at the Shape of her Future,” Vida: Her Kind (Women in Literary Arts), May 27 (2012). http://herkind.org/articles/on-my-mind/she-comes-to-look-at-the-shape-of-her-future#

 “Commanding Correspondence: History and ‘Evidence of Experience’ in the Letterbook of John Bruce, the East India Company Historiographer,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 52.2 (2011): 109–136.

“Writers Using Technology.” Writing in an Electronic World: Writers Using Technology: A Rhetoric with Readings. Eds. Kolko, Regan and Romano. Longman, 2001. 481–83.

 

 

Special Issues of Academic Journals:

Archival Lives of Popular Culture, The Journal of Popular Culture 53, co-edited with R. Ertuğ Altınay, 2021

Archiving Popular Culture, Archives and Records 41:3, co-edited with R. Ertuğ Altınay, 2020

 

Translation:

Janev, Jelena and Tatjana Dadić Dinulović. “Insuffer. With the Eyes Closed (Self-Portraits from Within.” Catalog text for Jelena Janev’s solo exhibit at Shock Cooperative Central Gallery, Novi Sad, Serbia. July 2021. Translated by Olivera Jokić. Novi Sad, RS: Multimedijalni centar Led Art, 2021. 24 pages with illustrations.

Tišma, Aleksandar. “The Soft War.” Translated by Olivera Jokić. In Old Age: A Short Story Anthology by Contemporary Serbian Authors. Belgrade, RS: Geopoetika, 2018. 13–29.

 

Public Scholarship and Traditional Media:

“Abortus i pravo na pravo” [“Abortion and the right to rights”], Danas (Serbian national daily), Sunday Edition, 7 May 2022

“Sve-znala i #nisamprijavila” [“Knew-All and #didnotreport”], Danas (Serbian national daily), Sunday Edition, 16 Jan 2022

“‘Mi’ nismo fašisti, ‘oni’ jesu” (“’We’ are not fascists, ‘they are’”), Danas (Serbian national daily), Sunday Edition, Section “Left-Right,” 19 Dec 2021. https://www.danas.rs/nedelja/mi-nismo-fasisti-oni-jesu/

 

Curation:

A City of One’s Own,” curation and catalogue text for exhibition at Local Project Art Space in New York, featuring work by Daniel A. Johnson (video), Beatriz E. Rodriguez (film photography), and Ruyin Tsai (painting); April 2019

 

Editorial:

Justice Collaborative E-Reader, Editorial Board, John Jay College CUNY, 2018–present

 

Digital Academic Media:

Careers for English Majors: The Many Things You Can Do with Your Humanities Degree, website about professional planning and development for English majors and other students in the humanities and liberal arts, available since 2013 at http://jjenglishcareers.commons.gc.cuny.edu  

 

Book Reviews:

The Alchemy of Empire: Abject Materials and the Technologies of Colonialism by Rajani Sudan. New York: Fordham UP, 2016. The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (Winter 2019): 473–477.

India and Europe in the Global Eighteenth Century. Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment. Ed. Simon Davies, Gabriel Sánchez-Espinosa, Daniel Sanjiv Roberts. Oxford UK: Voltaire Foundation, 2014. British Association for Romantic Studies Bulletin and Review 45 (2015)

Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835 by Jon E. Wilson. Journal of British Studies 49 (January 2010): 188–189.

Women and Politics: Feminisms with an Eastern Touch, Eds. Djurdja Knezevic, Koraljka Dilic, Ann Daub. Zagreb: Zenska Infoteka, 2000. Balkan Academic News, 2001, http://www.seep.ceu.hu/balkans/book_reviews.html.

Honors and Awards

Kwando Kinshasa Excellence in Mentorship Award, Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program, John Jay College, City University of New York, May 2021

“Samo vjeran pas:” Workshop on Post-Yugoslav Neoliberal Academic Selves and the Possibilities of Knowing the Balkans Otherwise, fellowship and travel grant, University of St. Gallen CH, Feb 2020

Committee on Globalization and Social Change, Faculty Fellow, City University of New York, 2019-20

Citizens Committee for New York City, grant for Tarte de Art, a community-focused art collective, 2019-20

Emerging Curators Grant, Local Project Art Space, Long Island City NY, 2019

Citizens Committee for New York City, grant for Tarte de Art, a community-focused art collective, 2017-18

NEH Enduring Questions in the Humanities Grant, 2014–15 (“What is Friendship?”)

Research-Intensive New Undergraduate Course Grant, John Jay College CUNY, “Women and Revolution,” 2014–15

Research Summary