Tom Emmert, longtime professor of history at Gustavus Adolphus College, recently released a new book that he co-edited, titled “Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies.”
The book is the result of seven years of collaborative research for a project called the Scholars’ Initiative. As Associate Director of the Scholars’ Initiative, Emmert helped direct an international consortium of historians, social scientists, and jurists to examine the salient controversies that still divide the peoples of the former Yugoslavia.
The findings of the Initiative’s 11 research teams represent a direct assault on the proprietary narratives and interpretations that nationalist politicians and media have impressed on mass culture in the successor states of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia.
“We hope this broadly conceived synthesis will assist scholars, public officials, and the people they represent both in acknowledging inconvenient facts and in discrediting widely held myths that inform popular attitudes and the electoral success of nationalist politicians who profit from them,” Emmert said.
Emmert has taught at Gustavus since 1973 and teaches the European history survey, as well as courses on both Imperial and modern Russia, the Ottoman Empire, 19th century European intellectual and cultural movements, and Balkan nationalism. Emmert has written two other books on the region formerly known as Yugoslavia — “Serbian Golgotha: Kosovo, 1389” and “Kosovo: Legacy of a Medieval Battle” — and has co-edited another book entitled “Conflict in Southeastern Europe at the End of the Twentieth Century.”
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