Melissa Bokovoy is professor and chair of the history department at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Bokovoy obtained her BA from Pomona College and MA and PhD from Indiana University, Bloomington. She has been at the University of New Mexico since 1991. She is the author of Peasants and Communists: Politics and Ideology in the Yugoslav Countryside, 1941–1953 (Pittsburgh, 1998), which won the Barbara Jelavich Prize of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies for best book in East European Studies. She is co-editor of State-Society Relations in Yugoslavia, 1945–1992 (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997) and co-author of Sharing the Stage: Biography and Gender in Western Civilization, 2 vols. (Houghton-Mifflin, 2003) and Sharing the World Stage: Biography and Gender in World History, 2 vols. (Cengage, 2009). She has published numerous articles and book chapters on 20th-century Yugoslavia. Currently on sabbatical, she is completing a manuscript on the politics of WWI commemorations in interwar Yugoslavia.
Dr. Bokovoy has won awards and grants for her research, teaching, and service. In 2001, she was appointed University of New Mexico Regents’ Lecturer and a decade later was named UNM Outstanding Teacher of the Year (2011-2012). In 2013, she became co-principal investigator of UNM’s American Historical Association’s Career Diversity Pilot Program funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She was the PI for the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Next Generation Implementation Grant (2016-2017). Recently, she was awarded, with Dr. Eleni Bastea, a NEH Enduring Question grant for the development of the interdisciplinary course: “How do Societies Remember” (2015-2018). In 2018, Bokovoy began a three-year term as an elected member of the American Historical Association’s Research Council.
Dr. Bokovoy has held a variety of different administrative and faculty governance positions at the University of New Mexico. She was the founding director of the International Studies Institute in the College of Arts and Sciences, the faculty advisor to the UNM Regents’ committee on Academic, Research and Student Affairs, the Department of History’s Graduate Director and Honors advisor, a two-term member and co-chair of the university’s Committee on Governance, a two-term member of the university’s Academic Freedom and Tenure committee, a one-term member of the Faculty Senate and its Operations committee, and a long-time initiator of the UNM Women’s Faculty Caucus. From 2013-2014, she served as one of four UNM Academic Leadership Academy (ALA) Fellows.