On 10 October 2025, Professor Vjeran Pavlaković gave a lecture titled The Fascist Genie Out of the Bottle: Pop Culture and Memory Politics in the Former Yugoslavia as part of the SSEES Southeast European Studies Seminar series at University College London (UCL).

The lecture explored how post-Yugoslav popular culture—through commemorative murals, graffiti, music, and film—reflects the region’s evolving politics of memory. Drawing on fieldwork conducted as part of the MEMPOP project, Pavlaković examined how these cultural forms operate within Croatia’s particularly vivid landscape of remembrance, where antifascist and socialist legacies have been contested through competing commemorative practices and new national narratives. His analysis showed how popular culture functions as both a mirror and a battleground for these tensions, simultaneously reinforcing nationalist myths and opening spaces for pluralistic memory and reconciliation.

🔗 More information on the UCL event page