Bojana Radovanovic

She is the director of the FWF project: Heterodox Landscapes and Interwoven Stories in Southeast Europe
This project is dedicated to the little-known religious traditions of Southeast Europe and examines the intersections between faith, folklore, and history within a geographical context. The focus is on traces of heresy, pre-Christian traditions, and gender-specific rituals. The research offers a new, inclusive perspective on the region’s complex past. Through an interdisciplinary approach, local religious dynamics are linked to European and global developments. The goal is also to bridge linguistic and academic divides between Eastern and Western Europe—in support of a shared, integrated cultural heritage.

Dr. Bojana Radovanovic is an experienced postdoctoral researcher in the field of religious history with a bachelor’s degree in Classical Philology (University of Belgrade, Serbia), a master’s degree in Classical Archaeology, and a Ph.D. in (medieval) history, which she completed in 2018 at the University of Vienna with a dissertation on the “language of heresy” in 9th-century Greek and Latin texts from a comparative perspective.

She worked at the Institute of History in Belgrade and at the Institute for Medieval Studies in Vienna. Between 2022 and 2024, she spent two years conducting research as a postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands) in the “History of Christianity” research group (within the Department of Textual, Historical, and Systematic Studies of Judaism and Christianity), funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). There, she taught courses on Byzantine theology, early Christianity, and patristics.

In 2023, 2024, and 2025, she completed three research stays at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) in Leipzig, and she was a Junior Fellow at the Field of Excellence “Dimensions of Europe” in Graz (October 2024–March 2025).

Her research focuses on the history of late antique and medieval religious movements, the pagan heritage of medieval philosophical and theological concepts, dualistic heresies in the Middle Ages, and new religious movements.

She is currently working on the anthology Proceedings of the Conference Medieval Heresies: On a Less Trodden Path, which is currently under review at Brill as part of the series East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450–1450 (editor: Florin Curta).

Her new five-year ASTRA-FWF project, titled Heterodox Landscapes and Interwoven Histories in Southeastern Europe: Counter Clockwise Dance and Cressets Filled with Ashes, was approved on June 25, 2025, and began on October 1, 2025, at the Institute for the Study of Religions at the University of Graz under the direction of Prof. Franz Winter.