Petra Požgaj held a CEEPUS grant for the summer semester of the academic year 2020/2021 and was staying at the Institute of Slavic Studies with her dissertation project Popular Yugoslav Youth Magazines: Socialist Visions of Popular Culture and Youth as Its Audience, highlighting the significance of popular culture and youth for the broader Yugoslav socialist project through an examination of the discourses on the figure of Yugoslav socialist youth and the developing field of popular culture in the period between the early 1950s and late 1970s. In particular, the dissertation focuses on a review and discussion of a number of legal, academic and cultural sources that function as contemporary reflections on youth and popular culture, such as scholarly articles in literary, cultural and pedagogical journals, youth literature and documents produced by various state bodies, and an analysis of cultural texts explicitly addressed at youth as consumers of popular culture, namely youth magazines issued by commercial publishing companies, which, themselves a part of popular culture, count on youth’s interest in other forms of popular culture, primarily film and music.
Petra was born in 1994 in Varaždin, Croatia. In 2019, after earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Comparative Literature and English Language and Literature at the University of Zagreb, she became a PhD candidate at the same university, attending the Doctoral Study Programme in Literature, Theatre and Performing Arts, Film, Musicology and Culture.
Selected bibliography:
Požgaj, Petra. 2021. „O nekakvim nedozrelim djevojkama i njihovim sudbinama: pripovijedanje djevojaštva u romanu Alma Josipa Barkovića.“ Anafora 8, 1. Forthcoming.
Požgaj, Petra. 2020. „Mladi kao publika popularne kulture u Plavome vjesniku (1954. – 1973.).“ Etnološka tribina 50, 43: 143–160.
Požgaj, Petra. 2018. „Mlade dame, glazbeni znalci i njihovi ukusi: figura obožavateljice kao prostor artikulacije društvenoga ukusa.“ Narodna umjetnost 55, 1: 7–21.