Board & Officers / Odbori

Managing board / Upravni odbor:

Sanja Runtić, President
Jelena Šesnić, Vice President
Valentina Markasović, Secretary
Lovorka Gruić-Grmuša
Marko Lukić

Supervisory board / Nadzorni odbor:

Petra Sapun Kurtin
Rajko Petković
Sven Cvek

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Sanja Runtić is Professor of English Literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Osijek, Croatia. Her teaching and research interests are in the areas of American and Canadian studies, American Indian literature, Indigenous studies, postcolonial literature and theory, postmodernism, and women’s studies. She has been awarded several grants, including the John F. Kennedy Institute research grant (Berlin, 2002), Fulbright fellowship (University of Arizona, 2003–2004 academic year), and Erasmus+ fellowships (University of Central Oklahoma, 2017 and Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, 2023).

 

Jelena Šesnić is Full Professor in the Department of English, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, Croatia. Her research interests encompass the American nineteenth-century literature, U.S. ethnic literatures, methodology of American Studies, and transnational cultural processes (with special emphasis on the Anglophone Croatian diaspora). She is the author of two books and editor and co-editor of two collections of essays. She is a co-founder of the Croatian Association for American Studies and its current vice-president, co-organizer of the annual American Studies Workshops, manager of the Association for American Studies in South-Eastern Europe, and co-editor of Working Papers in American Studies.

 

Valentina Markasović received her BA and MA degrees in History and English Language and Literature from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, J.J. Strossmayer University of Osijek, Croatia. She currently works there as a Teaching Assistant and is a doctoral student in the “Literature and Cultural Identity” program. She also works as an English teacher and a freelance translator. Her primary fields of interest are popular and fantastic literature, children’s and young adult literature, with a focus on the representation and construction of women’s identities.

 

Lovorka Gruić-Grmuša is an associate professor in the Department of English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka. She teaches literature courses, American culture and civilization, and media culture. She has been awarded several grants (Fulbright: UCLA; Program in Literature Grant: DUKE; Grad Rijeka library grant: Institut für Amerikanistik, Graz), co-edited a collection of papers: Space and Time in Language and Literature, published one book: The Novelistic Vision of Kurt Vonnegut, and has contributed to Croatian and English language literary journals. Her research interests focus on interdisciplinary approach to temporality and space-time (literature, science and technology), contemporary American literature, and media studies.

 

Marko Lukić is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Zadar, Croatia. He is the acting Head of the Department and he teaches various courses in American literature, popular culture and cultural theory. His research interests include violence and trauma in contemporary American fiction, human spatiality and space in literature and film, and the contemporary horror genre. He is the Editor in Chief of [sic] – A Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation, Conference Director/organizer of the international conference Re-Thinking Humanities and Social Sciences, and the co-founder of the Centre for Research in Social Sciences and Humanities.

 

Petra Sapun Kurtin teaches at the University of Rijeka (English Department and Master’s in translation) and is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Zagreb with a dual-degree in English and German. She spent a research year on a Fulbright scholarship at New York University in New York and Tulane University in New Orleans, as well as held a year-long Wirth Institute Doctoral Fellowship at University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. She serves as a member of the Wirth Alumni Network Executive Board and is also the president of the Croatian-Canadian Academic Association in Zagreb. Her thesis on Representations of New Orleans as a Port City in Recent American Fiction looks at port cities and technology from a “blue humanities” perspective.

 

Rajko Petković is an Associate Professor at the University of Zadar. He teaches courses on American film, including classical Hollywood, modern American independent film, and American animated film. His publications include the book American Animated Film Until 1941 and many articles published in specialized journals in Croatia and abroad. He is a member of the Association for American Studies in South East Europe and a frequent lecturer at the School of Media Culture “Dr. Ante Peterlić.” Along with film noir and American independent film, his research interests include film theory, history of film style, Croatian film, animated film, and classical Hollywood.

 

Sven Cvek works as assistant professor in the American Studies program of the English Department at the University of Zagreb. His primary field of study is contemporary US literature and popular culture. He also works on issues of post-socialist transition and Yugoslav socialism. His publications include: Towering Figures: Reading the 9/11 Archive (Brill 2011), Borovo on Strike: Labor in Transition 1987-1991 (in Croatian, BRID 2019), and articles in reviewed journals and collections.