Rate My Professor Melissa Bokovoy

Melissa Bokovoy is Professor of History and Regents' Lecturer in Arts and Sciences at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where she has served on the faculty since 1991, progressing from Assistant Professor (1991-1998) and Associate Professor (1998-2011) to full Professor since 2011. She chaired the Department of History from 2013 to 2019 and from 2022 to 2023. Bokovoy earned a B.A. in History from Pomona College, an M.A. in East European History, and a Ph.D. in Eastern Europe since 1453 from Indiana University, Bloomington. Recognized for teaching excellence, she was named UNM Outstanding Teacher of the Year for 2010-2011. She directed the International Studies Institute from 2003-2005 and 2006-2008, advised the UNM Board of Regents’ Academic/Student Affairs and Research Committee from 2011-2014, and served as Graduate Director and Honors Advisor in the History Department.

Her research centers on twentieth-century Yugoslavia and the Balkans, with specializations in memory and history, peasant society and culture, World War I and II, state and nation building, women and gender in war and politics, and collectivization of agriculture in Communist Eastern Europe. Key publications include her award-winning monograph Peasants and Communists: Politics and Ideology in the Yugoslav Countryside, 1941-1953 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), recipient of the Barbara Jelavich Prize; co-edited volume State-Society Relations in Yugoslavia, 1945-1992 (St. Martin's Press, 1997); co-authored Sharing the Stage: Biography and Gender in Western Civilization, 2 volumes (Houghton Mifflin, 2003); and Sharing the World Stage: Biography and Gender in World History, 2 volumes (Cengage, 2009). Notable articles and chapters encompass “Gendering Grief: Lamenting and Photographing the Dead in Serbia” (Aspasia, 2011), “Framing the Hero: Photographic Narratives of War in the Interwar Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes” (2016), and “Collectivization of Agriculture in Yugoslavia” (2014). Bokovoy has secured grants such as a Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Residential Fellowship (2005-2006), NEH Enduring Questions Grant (2015-2018), and NEH Next Generation Implementation Grant (2016-2017) as Principal Investigator. She led UNM’s American Historical Association Career Diversity Pilot Program (2013) funded by the Mellon Foundation. In professional service, she was President of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies (2021-2022), Councilor of the American Historical Association Research Division (2018-2020), and Academic Council Member for East European Studies at the Wilson Center (2010-2018).