Chosen Few

Dr. Mitja Velikonja is a Professor for Cultural Studies and head of Center for Cultural and Religious Studies at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Main areas of his research include contemporary Central-European and Balkan political ideologies, subcultures and graffiti culture, collective memory and post-socialist nostalgia. His monographs include Rock'n'Retro - New Yugoslavism in Contemporary Slovenian Music (Sophia, 2013), Titostalgia – A Study of Nostalgia for Josip Broz (Peace Institute, Ljubljana, 2008), Eurosis – A Critique of the New Eurocentrism (Peace Institute, Ljubljana, 2005) and Religious Separation and Political Intolerance in Bosnia-Herzegovina (TAMU Press, 2003). He is co-author of the book Celestial Yugoslavia: Interaction of Political Mythologies and Popular Culture (XX vek, 2012), and co-editor and co-author of books Post-Yugoslavia - New Cultural and Political Perspectives (Palgrave, 2014) and Yugoslavia From A Historical Perspective (HCHR, 2017). He was a full-time visiting professor at Jagiellonian University in Krakow (2002 and 2003), at Columbia University in New York (2009 and 2014), at University of Rijeka (2015), at New York Institute in St. Petersburg (2015 and 2016), at Yale University (2020), Fulbright visiting researcher in Philadelphia (2004/2005), and visiting researcher at The Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (2012) and at the Remarque Institute of the New York University (2018). For his achievements he received four national and one international award (Erasmus EuroMedia Award by European Society for Education and Communication, 2008). His last monograph Post-Socialist Political Graffiti in the Balkans and Central Europe (Routledge, 2020) was awarded as one of the most important scientific achievements of University of Ljubljana for the year 2020.

The Chosen Few will certainly be attractive to both scholars and a wider international public. Mitja Velikonja’s sophisticated analysis of "Ultra" graffiti and street art draws on a wide range of critical theories from cultural and media studies, visual anthropology, and other disciplines. Using his vast archive of photographs from the past 20 years, he takes readers on a thought-provoking tour of signs, symbols, and images that are often ephemeral but occasionally last for decades. These subversive landscapes are everywhere yet are often invisible to those who do not know how to read them or take no notice in their everyday lives. Velikonja perceptively teases out the small details and hidden meanings of the various forms of football fan graffiti and complements a growing body of research on cultural aspects of sports. The connection between Ultras, graffiti, and collective memory is particularly relevant in the Yugoslav successor states, since football fans often produce murals and other kinds of graffiti dedicated to fallen soldiers, sites of memory, or simply nationalist slogans.—Dr. Vjeran Pavlaković, Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Rijeka, Croatia and Member, Association for the Study of Nationalities