Dr. Gal Kirn

Only by appointment! Registration at kirn@europa-uni.de

• Cultural Sociology
• Critical Memory and Heritage Studies
• Decolonial Studies and (Post-)Marxism
• Political Aesthetics, Transformation Theories, and Ecology
• Comparative Southeast European Studies

Monographs

Fortchoming
Memory of Liberation. Ljubljana University Press: Ljubljana (2025).

The Partisan Counter-Archive: Retracing the Ruptures of Art and Memory in the
Yugoslav People's Liberation Struggle. De Gruyter: Berlin, 2020 (also in Slovene, 2021; and Spanish – in translation).

Partisan Ruptures: Self-Management, Market Reform and the Spectre of Socialist Yugoslavia, Pluto Press: London, 2019.

My edited volumes
Forthcoming
Remembering Anti-Fascism: Art, Monuments and Critical Memory Studies in 21st Century, co-edited with Rebecka Thor Katz and Cecilia Sjoholm, under contract with De Gruyter (Series Cultural Memory), 2025.

Special double issue on Memory Cultures and Political Economy in sociological journal Družboslovne razprave, co-edited with Natalija Majsova, 2025.

Published
Emancipatory Art in the (post)Yugoslav context, special edition of the journal Anthropos, nr 1-2, 2024.

Nights of the Dispossesed: Riots Unbound, Columbia Books on Architecture and the
City: New York; with Natasha Ginwala and Niloufar Tajeri, 2021.

Beyond Neoliberalism? Social Analysis after 1989, Palgrave Macmillan: London; with Marian Burchardt, 2017.

Yugoslav Partisan Art, special issue in the journal Slavica tergestina – European Slavic Studies Journal, Volume 17; guest editors, with Jernej Habjan, 2016.

Encountering Althusser, Bloomsbury: New York. With Peter Thomas, Sara Farris
and Katja Diefenbach, 2013.

Surfing the Black Wave. Transgressive moments in Yugoslav Cinema, Jan van Eyck
Academie: Maastricht, 2012; with Dubravka Sekulić and Žiga Testen, 2012.

Post-Fordism and Its Discontents, Jan van Eyck Academy, B-Books and Peace Institute: Maastricht, 2010.

Dissensual political and artistic practices in the post-Yugoslav context, Jan van Eyck
Academy and Musem of Modern Art, Maastricht; with Bojana Piškur.

Peer reviewed articles
“Women antifascist activism in WW2 and Aftermath: Protests, Monuments and
Memory actions in Ljubljana” in: Special issue of Memory Studies, ed. Ksenia Robbe, forthcoming 2025.

“Monumental Iconoclasm after 1989: Between Postsocialism and Decolonialism?”, in: [Counter-]Monuments. Transitory Memory Practices in Public Space, eds. Maria Engelskirchen, Ursula Frohne and Marianne Wagner, Transcript, 2025: 64-79.

“Partisan Ecology in Yugoslav Liberation and Antifascist Art”, in: Baltic Worlds, ed. Ninna Moerner, 2023 (4): 45-52.

“Female Partisan Memory from Below: Landscapes of Resistance / Krajine upora
(Marta Popovida, 2021)” in: Kino! Revija za film, n.49, 2023.

“Partisan Poetic “Counter-Archive” in World War II: Partisan Anthems to the Future, in Słoweńców portret własny. Studia z pamięci zbiorowej. Self Portrait of Slovenes. On Slovene Collective Memory, eds Marta Cmiel-Bażant and Jasmina Šuler Galos, Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego: Warsaw, 2023, 159-181.

“The primitive accumulation of capital and memory: mnemonic wars as national
reconciliation discourse in (post-)Yugoslavia, in: Memory studies, 2022, 15 (6): 1470-1483. DOI: ttps://doi.org/10.1177/17506980221133724mce_temp_url#

“Vielschichtig und revolutionär. Die jugoslawischen Partisanen-Gedenkstätten” (with Roberta Burghardt), in: Informationen. Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift des Studienkreises Deutscher Widerstand 1933-1945. 2022, 47 (96): 13-18.

“Thirty years after the break-up of Yugoslavia: the primitive (dis)accumulation of
capital and memory; or, how (not) to make this country great again” in: Historical
materialism, 2022, 30 (1): 3-29, https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/30/1/article-p3_2.xml.

“Counter-archival surplus: remembering the partisan rupture in post-socialist
Times”, in: Artl@s bulletin, ISSN 2264-2668, 2022, 11 (1): 14-28.

»In a partisan way« : Želimir Žilnik's Uprising in Jazak and the reconstruction of
antifascist memory from below. Studies in Eastern European cinema, 2021, 13 (3): 272-287: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2040350X.2021.2018868

“New Yugoslavia: A Diasporic State?”, in: J-Bild journal, 2021 5 (1): 83-
106: https://bild-lida.ca/journal/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/J-BILD_5-1_Kirn.pdf

“Was Dancing Possible During the Fascist Occupation of Yugoslavia?”, in:
Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, special issue Yugoslav Performance Art: On the Deferred Production of Knowledge (ed. Goran Pavlić). N. 11, 2020. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2020.00011.238.

“Tito's no to Schmitt: against the compatibility of the partisan figures, against the Blut und Boden ideology of populism”, in: Philosophy world democracy, 2020: 1-13. https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/articles-1/titos-no-to-schmitt

“Awakening Lazarus: Forgotten Figures — Masses and Surplus?”, in: Stasis Journal.
St.Petersburg, 2018, 6 (2): 10-64.

“A Few Notes on the History of Social Ownership in the Spheres of Culture and
Film in Socialist Yugoslavia from the 1960s to the 1970s”, in: Etnološka tribina 2014, 44 (37): 109-123.

“Das Absterben des Staates in Jugoslawien: Von der Partisanenrevolution zum
Marktsozialismus”, in: Das Argument, 2016, 58 (3): 321-337.

Other scholarly articles 

The Ruptures of Non-Alignment and Socialist Yugoslavia: Ten Theses on
Alternative Pasts and Futures, in: Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement (ed. Paul Stubbs), McGill University Press: Minnesota, 2023.

Women Figures and Everyday Life: Photo Counter-Archive of Unwanted Images, in Ekran, nov-dec., vol. 60, 2023.

„Na partizanski način“: Želimir Žilnik in antifašistični spomin od spodaj, in: Kino! Revija za film, n.49, 2023.

Built to be torn down, fed to be starved, resurrected to be disposed of: capitalism is a riot, a riot from above (with Niloufar Tajeri), in: Nights of the dispossessed: riots unbound. New York: Columbia Books, 2021: 185-204.

 Mediatisation of the Yugoslav Partisan Struggle: Towards a New Counter-Archive (eds) M Prusnik and O Luthar The Media of Memory. Leiden: Brill, 2020: 63-84.

Monuments in Ljubljana and Brussels: From Nationalist Reconciliation to Open Rehabilitation of Fascism, in Populism and Memory (eds Ayhan Kaya and Chiara de Cesari), London: Routledge, 2020: 47-68.

Maribor's social uprising in the European crisis: from antipolitics of people to politicisation of periphery's surplus population. In: Social movements in the Balkans: rebellion and protest from Maribor to Taksim (eds Bieber, Florian and Dario Brentin). London; New York: Routledge, 2019: 30-47.

Contradictions of the socialist civil society in nineteen-eighties Yugoslavia, in: The long 1980s: constellations of art, politics and identities: a collection of microhistories (hrsg. Grandas Teresa et al.). Amsterdam: Valiz/L'Internationale, 2018: 184-193.

Eisenstein, Vertov, Medvedkin: revolutionary cinefication and communist subjectivity, in: Kinokultura, 2017(58): http://www.kinokultura. com/2017/58-kirn.shtml

A critique of transition studies on postsocialism, or how to rethink and reorient 1989? the case of (post)socialist (post)Yugoslavia, in: Burchardt, Marian and Kirn, Gal (eds). Beyond neoliberalism: social analysis after 1989. Cham: Palgrave.

On Yugoslav Market Socialism Through Živojin Pavlovic's When I Am Dead and Pale (1967), in: (eds) Jelaća D, Kolanović M and Lugarić D, The Cultural Life of Capitalism in Yugoslavia. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017: 139-158.

Notes from the Archive of Dissent: Monuments to Sub/Urban Riots (mit Niloufar Tajeri), eds Aleksandra Sekulić and Dušan Grlja Performing the Museum, Novi Sad: Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina.

From Critique of Groys’ Reading to Return of the Avant-garde, in: En-Garde 20/21 (eds Aleksandra Sekulić and Branko Dimitrijević), HBS: Belgrade, 2016: 21-41.

Academic Background

From 01/2025
Research Associate at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder)

06/2022
Habilitation Colloquium: Assistant Professor of Cultural Sociology, University of Ljubljana

01/2022 - 01/2025
Researcher in the project Distrusting Monuments. Art and War in Former Yugoslavia, Södertörn University, Sweden

10/2021 - 09/2025
Head of the research group "Protests, Art Practices, and Memory Culture in the Post-Yugoslav Context," University of Ljubljana

08/2020 - 02/2021
Ad-Futura Professorship for Cultural History at the University of Nova Gorica

11/2017 - 06/2020
Open-Topic Researcher with the project "Kino-Train: Between Soviet Avant-garde Utopia and Apparatus," TU Dresden, West Slavic Studies and Cultural Sciences

Summer Semester 2017
Lecturer at Justus Liebig University, Giessen

06-09/2016
Postdoc Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation with the topic of the Avant-garde in the Soviet Union, Humboldt University of Berlin, Slavic Studies

02/2016 - 06/2016
Visiting Professorship at the University of Primorska, Media Studies

10/2015 - 02/2016
Fellow in the project Monument to Sub-Urban Riots, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart

02-10/2015
7 months parental leave

10/2013 - 02/2015
Postdoc Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation with the topic of the Avant-garde in the Soviet Union, Humboldt University of Berlin, Slavic Studies

01/2013 – 05/2013
Fellow with the topic "Memory and Revolution," Irmgard Coninx Foundation at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB)

10/2012
Doctorate in Philosophy, summa cum laude, University of Nova Gorica

09/2010 - 09/2012
Researcher/Fellow in the project Parallax Views beyond Revisionism and Nostalgia in Post-Yugoslavia, ICI - Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin

Secured Third-Party Funding and Grants

Grant approval for the research project "Protests, Art Practices, and Memory Culture in the Post-Yugoslav Context," Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana. Funding Institution: Slovenian Research Agency ARRS (Grant Aleš Debeljak, J6-3144; 10/2021–09/2025. Secured Funding: 300,000 EUR (2 TVL positions + materials)

Application for the renewal of research/professorship stays. Funding Institution: Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, 03/2023–06/2023. Secured Funding: 10,000 EUR (+ materials)

Grant approval for the research project "Distrusting Monuments. Art and War in Former Yugoslavia,” Södertörn University, Stockholm. Funding Institution: Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies, 01/2022-01/2025. Secured Funding: 538,000 EUR (3 part-time positions + materials)

Grant approval for the Ad-Futura Visiting Professorship in Cultural History, University of Nova Gorica. Funding Institution: Ad Futura, Slovenian Public Fund for Human Resources Development, 08/2020-02/2021. Secured Funding: 22,000 EUR (equivalent to a TVL 13 position + materials)

Grant approval for the project funding "Counter-Archive,” ICI-Berlin. Funding Institution: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 02-06/2021. Secured Funding: 5,000 EUR (materials)

A comprehensive overview of current courses can be found on ViaCampus.

European University Viadrina, Cultural Philosophy, Frankfurt (Oder)
- Monuments Must Fall? Iconoclasm in the Age of Decolonisation and Postsocialism, WISE2025
- Guest lectures in Katja Diefenbach's colloquium "Ereignis und Kritik". Lectures on Toni Negri's Grundrisse and Empire, SOSE 2023

Södertörn University, Aesthetics, Stockholm
- Guest lectures within Prof. Cecilia Sjoholm's "Aesthetics" for Master's students
Topics: Epistemology and Art; Memory and Art, April 2023

Parrhesia, School for Philosophy & Diffrakt, Center for Peripheral Theory, Berlin
- Manifesto for Counter-Memory in an Age of Neoliberalism and Decolonisation
Lecture, SoSe 2022

Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana
- Guest lectures in Global Culture (Seminar by Prof. Ksenija Vidmar Horvat)
BA Seminar, SoSe 2022
Language: Slovenian

Institute of Theatre Studies, Justus Liebig University, Giessen
- Riots: Beyond Political and Artistic Stages
Teaching assignment, BA/MA Seminar, SoSe 2021
- Work(ers) in Film: Focus on East European Films
Teaching assignment, MA Seminar (Choreography and Performance), WiSe 2017

Faculty of Humanities, University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia
- Visiting Professor in Cultural History
BA Lecture, WiSe 2020/21

Institute for Slavic and Cultural Studies, Technical University of Dresden
- Utopia and/in Eastern Film
BA/MA Seminar, WiSe 2019
- In the Space of Utopia. Life Constraints and the Quest for Freedom in Eastern European Socialist Film
Film seminar in cooperation with Kino im Kasten; Program conception and lectures with Saskia Metan, SoSe 2019

Media Studies, University of Primorska, Koper
- Visiting Professor on October Revolution, Memory, and Film in the Twentieth Century
BA-MA Lecture, SoSe 2017
Language: Slovenian

Summer School, German National Academic Foundation/Max Weber Foundation, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana
- 2-week Masterclass/Course: Art in the Age of (D)Anger
30 hours, 20-30 August 2018, Ljubljana

Summer School, Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities, Ohrid
- Politics of Memory in the (Post)Yugoslav Context
24-28 June 2016, Ohrid

Free University of Berlin
- Seminar: Problems of Philosophical Film Aesthetics II (with Prof. Frieder Otto Wolf)
BA/MA Seminar, WiSe 2012/13

Conferences and Symposia

22-29/11/2023
Partisan Festival: Filmen, Performances, and Vorträge (mit Andrej Mirćev und Dirk Cieslak), Vierte Welt, Berlin

08/11/2023
Apologoscapes: (Counter)productivities of apologies in politics, art, and institutional infrastructures (mit Katja Kobolt und Suzana Milevska), ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana

23-25/05/2023
From Margins to Autonomy of Art in the Post-Yugoslav Context (mit Petja Grafenauer und Daša Tepina), Konferenz, Academy of Fine Art, Ljubljana

04/05/2023
Politics and Memory of Transitional Time, European University of Viadrina, Frankfurt Oder

02-04/02/2023
Konferenz Comics im Kommunismus und danach: Propaganda und Subversion, Zeitgeschichtliches Forum Leipzig und Institut für Kunstgeschichte (mit Tanja Zimmermann und Mirt Komel), Leipzig

04-10/2023
Symposium Obdobja 42: Slovenska literatura in umetnost v družbenih kontekstu, Ljubljana

Seit 04/2022
Seminare & Vorträge von Parrhesia, Berlin School for Philosophy, Diffrakt/Hopscotch, Berlin

02-03/11/2022
Symposium Neue Linke: urbane und ökologische Furchen im ehemaligen Jugoslawien, Faculty of Arts & Fakultät für Sozialwissenschaften.

Recent Lectures

08/11/2023
Concept paper on the erased and impossible apology in Slovenian context
Apologoscapes: (Counter)productivities of apologies in politics, art, and institutional infrastructures
ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana

14/10/2023
Politiken des Aufruhrs: Gegen die herrschende Ordnung mit oder ohne utopischen Horizont? Unruhe(n), Gemeine Stadt – Berlin gemeinsam gestalten
Aquarium am Südblock, Berlin

08/09/2023
Über Nationalisierung von Erinnerung in Osteuropa und Jugoslawien, Kolloquium "Zeitschichten" / Internationales Mahnmal 8. September 2023
Stiftung Hamburger Gedenkstätten, Hamburg

06/07/2023
Critique of national reconciliation (Vortrag and Organisation des Podiums Beyond reconciliation: resistance, resilience, repair), Memory Studies Association Jahreskonferenz, University

Antifascist women protests and memory activism nexus, closing conference of ERC Remembering activism project, led by Ann Rigney, Utrecht University

03/02/2023
War and transition in the post-Yugoslav comic/graphic novel, at Comics in Communism - and beyond: propaganda and subversion.
Institut Kunstgeschichte, Leipzig

13/10/2022
Manifesto of counter-memory: a proposal
Reykjavik Nordic Memory Studies Association conference „Counter-Memory“
Reykjavik University

06/10/2022
Counter-Atlas as a Battlefield
Imagining and activating a counter-atlas of the trace, TRACTS network, working group 1&3
Macba, Madrid

29/04/2022
Counter-Archive and counter-hegemonic gaze in the post-Yugoslav studies
Annual conference of Südosteuropa Gesellschaft, Regensburg

12/01/2022
Notes on counter-archive: Method for arts and theory?
SSEES Southeast Europe Studies Seminar “Archives and Memory in SE Europe”
UCL London