Aleksandra Đurić-Milovanović, PhD, is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Balkan Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade, Serbia. She graduated from the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade and completed her master's studies at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Belgrade. She received her PhD from the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade in 2012 with the topic “Romanian Neo-Protestants in Vojvodina: between religious and ethnic identity”. Since 2010, she has been employed at the Institute for Balkan Studies SASA, as a research assistant, since 2013 in the scientific title - research associate and since 2018 in the title of senior research associate. For the purposes of writing her doctoral dissertation in 2011 and 2012, she paid a research visit to Cornell University (New York) in the United States. For research on the migration of religious minorities from Yugoslavia to the United States, she received a scholarship from the Legacy Bible Institute Ohio USA, for ethnographic and archival research in 2015. Since 2016, she has been collaborating with the University College of Cork, Ireland, Department of Religious Studies, where she was also a visiting professor in August-November 2017. During 2017, she was selected as a participant in the International Fellow Program KAICIID: Center for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue. Since 2021, she has been a member of the Scientific Committee for Religious Freedom in Barcelona at the Ramon Llull University. She has given guest lectures at the University of Belgrade and Niš, the University of Cambridge, the University College of Cork, Houton College in the United States, the Western University of Timisoara, the University of Jena (Germany) and Ramon Lulle University (Spain). She has participated in numerous scientific conferences and published three monographs and one manual, edited an international collection of papers and published as an author or co-author a number of papers in journals and collections in Serbian, English, Romanian and Russian. Her research interest include religious minorities, religion and migration, Orthodox Christian renewal movements, Evangelicals, interreligious dialogue.
Her recent co-edited book with Radmila Radić, Orthodox Christian Renewal Movements in Eastern Europe, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in series Christianity and Renewal in 2017. This edited volume explores the changes underwent by the Orthodox Churches of Eastern and Southeastern Europe as they came into contact with modernity through diverse and interdisciplinary contributions. The movements of religious renewal among Orthodox believers appeared almost simultaneously in different areas of Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth and during the first decades of the twentieth century. This volume examines what could be defined as renewal movement in different Eastern Orthodox traditions. Some case studies include the God Worshippers in Serbia, religious fraternities in Bulgaria, the Zoe movement in Greece, the evangelical movement among Romanian Orthodox believers known as Oastea Domnului (The Lord’s Army), the Doukhobors in Russia, and the Maliovantsy in Ukraine. This volume provides a new understanding of processes of change in the spiritual landscape of Orthodox Christianity and various influences such as other non-Orthodox traditions, charismatic leaders, new religious practices and rituals.