Dr. Jelena Radovanović

Jelena Radovanović is a historian of the Ottoman Empire and South-Eastern Europe focusing on the transformative period of nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. She relies on archival sources in Ottoman Turkish and Slavic languages to examine broader themes of legal encounters, state-making, and discourses of civilization and modernization. Her dissertation “Contested Legacy: Property in Transition to Nation-State in Post-Ottoman Niš,” recently defended at Princeton University, analyzes how Serbia implemented its property laws, based on Western models, in annexed territory where property had previously been regulated by a complex overlap of Islamic law, the Ottoman Land Code, local regulations, and custom. Her current research project addresses the Islamic religious endowments (waqfs)—a paramount Ottoman institution in which charity, faith, infrastructure, urban development, economic enterprise, hygiene, and legitimacy intersect—and traces their legacy in the post-Ottoman space.