Milica Iličić is a doctoral candidate in Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

She received pedagogical training as part of her graduate study, serving as a solo instructor in Russian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, and as a teaching assistant for courses on Slavic literature and culture. In 2020, she was awarded a Teaching Fellowship by Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for her syllabus for Thinking Bodies: Literature, Film, and Performance.

Her teaching philosophy is grounded in integrative learning, community-building, collaboration, and inclusivity. She is completing the Advanced Track of the Teaching Development Program at Columbia’s Center for Teaching and Learning.

Her dissertation, Joyful Sensibilities: Bakhtin’s Polyphonic Aesthetics and the Ethics of Generosity, synthesizes Slavic scholarship, literature, and cinema and contemporary studies of affect. The project draws connections between Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of unfinalizability, dialogism, and polyphony, and what political theorist Jane Bennett calls “joyful attachment” and “ethics of generosity.” Through analyses of Dostoevsky’s novels and Dušan Makavejev’s films, the project uncovers both the pitfalls of pleasurable affects, and sites of agency where their transformative potential may nevertheless be realized.

Aside from her research, she designed a digital textbook for the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language, and ran an online publication on arts and culture in Serbia.

She is expected to receive her doctoral degree in June 2022.