Tvrtko Jakovina


Tvrtko Jakovina is a Croatian historian. Jakovina is a full time professor at the at the Department of History at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb.

Biography

Early life

Tvrtko Jakovina was born in the eastern Croatian town of Požega where he finished elementary school and high school, and also completed his compulsory military service.

Education

He studied history at the University of Zagreb from 1991 to 1996. Jakovina was founder and first honorary member of the Croatian branch of International Students of History Association. As an exchange student he attended courses at University of Kansas, USIA and Boston College. He completed his postgraduate studies at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. During the 2000/01 academic year, he was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University in Washington D.C.. Since then, he has also attended London School of Economics and Political Science, and seminars on the Holocaust in Israel.

Academic Career

Jakovina has presented many public lectures and attended many forums in Croatia and abroad. He has co-authored a history textbook for senior high school students. He has authored hundreds of articles published in daily newspapers such as Jutarnji list and Vjesnik. Due to his publicly expressed attitudes on the importance of objectivity in historical studies, he has often been attacked by Croatian radical right-wingers. In his work, he is mostly interested in the history of the 20th century, American history, the Cold War, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the policy of detente.

Publications

Books

Trtko Jakovina is a prominent public critic of a violent right wing Croatian nationalism, historical revisionism of World War II oriented towards unscientific positive reinterpretations of the puppet Independent State of Croatia and absent or unscientific recognition of Ustashe genocide against Serbs, Jews, Roma as well as their crimes against their opponents.
Jakovina has signed the CIVICO Europa initiative against autocratic policies in the fight against COVID-19 in Hungary. The initiative was signed by 73 European personalities including Jean-Claude Juncker, Carl Bildt, Slavoj Žižek and from Croatia alongside Jakovina also Miljenko Jergović, Vesna Pusić, Seid Serdarević and Željko Trkanjec.