Founded at UC Berkeley in August 2022 by two faculty members (Slavic), five graduate students (History, Music, Rhetoric, and Slavic), and three undergraduates. The original group also included a faculty member from Stanford. In January 2023, NYS became a joint Berkeley-Stanford research group with three additional faculty members joining from Stanford.
Today NYS has 224 registered members: 136 at Berkeley, 45 at Stanford, 7 from other local universities, and 36 from the Bay Area community. These included 35 faculty members (21 at Berkeley), 2 post-docs at Stanford, 56 graduate students (34 at Berkeley), and 78 undergraduates. There are 130 active members of the research group in AY 2025-2026.
Faculty and graduate students come from 26 departments, including Anthropology, Archeology, Art History, Biology, Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages & Cultures, English, Ethnic Studies, Film & Media Studies, German, History, Law, Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures, Music, Philosophy, Physics, Political Science, Rhetoric, Slavic, Sociology, Theatre & Performance Studies, and more.
NYS has organized 80 academic events since 2022. Activities include: 37 reading group sessions (including 11 with authors); 17 talks and panels; 14 film screenings and discussions (including 7 with directors); 5 manuscript workshops; 4 music events and socials; 5 national conferences; and more. NYS activities are open to all and are regularly and enthusiastically attended by community members from across the Bay Area. In AY 2025-26, NYS events drew over 700 people.
NYS supports research and teaching about Yugoslavia on both campuses, offering courses on South Slavic history, Balkan folklore, Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literature and culture, and Yugoslav film. Berkeley also offers a comprehensive three-year sequence of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) language. In AY 2025-26, NYS enrolled 120 students in nine courses on both campuses.
In 2023, members of the Berkeley-Stanford research group founded a national scholarly organization, the New Yugoslav Studies Association (NYSA). An affiliate of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), NYSA today has 710 members and four other research clusters modeled on Berkeley-Stanford NYS—in Vienna, Toronto, New York, and the UK.
The work of NYS has been generously supported by the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ISEEES), the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), and Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Berkeley; the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies (CREEES), Department of Art & Art History, and Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford; and the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.
Looking to the future, NYS aims to make Berkeley the premier center for South Slavic research, boasting a full-fledged interdisciplinary program of study and a vibrant community of scholars, cultural workers, and policy experts. To meet these goals, NYS launched its first fundraising campaign in 2025. Contributions to the New Yugoslav Studies Fund will bolster BCS instruction at Berkeley and help NYS develop new research opportunities for students and faculty alike.