Biljana Oklopčić will be working on a research project entitled "'Drownd herself': Female Slave Suicides in the American South"

Oklopčić is associate professor (of American literature), currently serving in the capacity of Vice-Dean for Study Programs and Lifelong Learning, at the Department of English of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Osijek, Croatia. She specializes in literature of the American South, American Modernism, popular culture, popular fiction, and stereotypes in literature and culture. She is the author of Faulkner and the Native Keystone: Reading (Beyond) the American South (Springer Nature 2014) and Myth and Stereotype in William Faulkner's Works (FFOS Publishing 2021). She was a speaker at conferences in Rijeka, Zagreb, Olomouc, Frankfurt, Cape Girardeau, Louisville, Chapel Hill, Paris, Pecs, London, Poznan, Osijek, Podgorica, Sarajevo, and other cities. As a 2008-2009 postdoctoral Fulbright scholar at the UNC at Chapel Hill, she was doing research on Southern men stereotypes in William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels and short stories. After the return to her home institution, she has continued to pursue her scholarly interests as a Georg Eckert Institute, John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, and Erasmus grantee. She has taken part in the projects The Rise of City Cultures in Central Europe (the Institute of Culture Studies at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan) and European Context of Croatian Popular Literature (University of Osijek).