Novi Sad

American Studies

University of Novi Sad

2004-05

The academic year I spent in the US was incredibly inspiring. It tremendously enhanced my academic development through the courses and conferences I attended, as well as through personal contacts and conversations I had with the academic faculty I was in contact with. As a result, I applied and have been admitted to the Ph.D. program at CUNY (City University of New York), Graduate Center , English Department where I'm starting my doctoral studies this coming fall.

As for my current position, during the 2004-05 academic year, which I spent as a visiting scholar at The New School, I got a great input for my teaching practice. This reflected during the 2005-06 in lively, stimulating classes, both for my students and myself.

I did my internship with The Institute of Distributed Creativity (IDC), an online forum for New Media, Education and Critical Thinking. It was a fascinating experience, considering that I started exploration in the field I had not been trained in. However, it proved provocative enough, so I was able to get familiarized with it quite easily and gladly. I soon started assisting with designing data bases to be used as online teaching-learning tools. Although extremely demanding, it was at the same time endlessly amusing and it spurred my further inquiry in Critical Theory and provoked my interest in New Media. I assisted in organizing the conference held under the auspices of IDC and CUNY GC (New Media Education), which hosted reputable keynote speakers as well as innovative, critically engaged participants.

Upon my return to Serbia I continued collaboration with the KUDA New Media group, which also resulted in several publications and exhibitions.

Apart from my work and engagement in academia, I also broadly partook in socializing, traveling and attending various cultural events. New York offers fantastic opportunities in this respect and I had a chance to attend a great number of concerts, exhibitions, performances, talks, lectures, etc. Partying and meeting new people is also one of the things which makes this city so great.

Traveling, on the other hand, gave me an insight into the diversity of the US which I took great pleasure in exploring, too. I visited San Francisco , New Orleans , DC , Chicago , Boston , Philadelphia and some little towns and enjoyed being exposed to so many different faces this country has. It was major inspiration for some of my scholarly writings since my background is in cross-disciplinary study in Literature and Cultural Studies.

At the moment I am engaged in the exams held at my Department.

Before the exams started, I finished rewriting the paper which I presented at the conference at Columbia University March 31-April 01, 2006 as a continuation of my collaboration with Professor John Broughton and the group of his Cultural Studies doctoral students.

I'm planning on starting my doctoral studies this coming fall at the English Department, City University New York .

Contemporary British fiction, subcultures, music, countercultures, critical theory, teaching (critical pedagogy), reading as self-creation, cross-cultural encounters, cross-artistic dialogue.

nikolinaknezevic@yahoo.com