Biography
Born in 1975 in Kruševac. After graduating from the Faculty of Civil Engineering, University of Belgrade (Department of Structures), she enrolled in and completed a Master's degree in Conservation of Historic Buildings at the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, University of Bath, UK, in 2007. After graduating, she worked briefly at the City Institute for the Protection of Monuments of the City of Belgrade before returning in 2009 to pursue her doctoral studies at the School of History, Archaeology and Religion (SHARE), Cardiff University, UK. She worked as an assistant and researcher at both universities.
The Interpretation Theory – Explaining the National Trauma Through Monuments
Abstract The prevalence of the Critical Heritage Theory (CHT) in recent decades coincided with the geo-political advantage which major Western powers upheld over their main international competitors until recently. The CHT methodology employed during this period gradually supplemented the traditional definition of heritage by introducing the concept of fluidity in the meanings and significance of the past, a variable that changed from one generation to another and from one socio-political system to another. Critical evaluation of the past thus resulted in an overwhelming practice of theoretical re-interpretation of history, which oversaw that heritage and cultural memories were displaced from the sphere of material to that of ideas, as if the material evidence was nothing more than an Andersonian concept of imagined communities. If a collective suffering of a community is imagined, then what would prevent the repetition of a collective trauma? The CHT argues for its disconnection from the sphere of materiality, which implies that the physical experience of trauma, especially when collective, is but a mere footnote in a nation’s history. This deeply troubling notion was recently challenged by the postulates of the Interpretation Theory, which focuses on the models of interpretation of the past by respecting its materiality. This paper argues that the Interpretation Theory more accurately defines heritage and its historic backgrounds than the fluid ideology behind the CHT.
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