Tijana Krstic - Biography#

Tijana Krstic is a historian of the early modern Ottoman Empire and its connections with the wider early modern world. She is interested in social, cultural and religious history, especially in circulation of texts, artifacts, people and religio-political concepts across imperial, cultural and confessional boundaries.

She comes from Subotica, Serbia, where she completed highschool in 1994 before beginning her studies at the American University in Bulgaria. Upon receiving her BA degree in 1998, she embarked on doctoral studies of history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her PhD thesis, defended in 2004, focused on the narratives of conversion to Islam in the Ottoman Balkans and led to her first monograph, published in 2011. Subsequently, in several articles she turned towards the early modern Mediterranean to study the experiences of forcibly Christianized Spanish Muslims who sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire.

In 2009, after eleven years in the US, she changed continents to take a position at Central European University (then in Budapest, but since 2020 in Vienna), which became her permanent academic home. From 2015 to 2022 (extended due to covid) she was the PI on the project entitled "The Fashioning of a Sunni Orthodoxy and the Entangled Histories of Connfession Building in the Ottoman Empire, 15th-17th Centuries" (OTTOCONFESSION), which was funded by the ERC Consolidator Grant. It resulted in a number of publications by herself and her team that changed the discussion of religious politics in the early modern Ottoman world.

Currently, she is a CEU representative on the Board of Directors of the Cluster of Excellence "Eurasian Transformations" (EurAsia), funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), and coordinates research and teaching with the Cluster partners.