Radmila was born in Kragujevac, Serbia, on August 30, 1935. Growing up, she recalled that “even though we had little in terms of material goods, we felt that our possibilities were boundless. […] We felt that the world was ours to discover.”
With a mind suited to the rigors of language acquisition, Radmila studied French and Russian in high school, and later received her B.A. in English literature from the University of Belgrade. Together with her husband, Ivan Gorup, Radmila moved to New York in 1967. Here, Radmila continued to cultivate her talent for language and literary analysis. She earned an M.A. in French literature from St. John’s University in Queens and then enrolled in Columbia University, the institution that would be her academic home for most of her career. She earned an M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Linguistics – writing her doctoral dissertation on “The Semantic Organization of the Serbo-Croatian Verb.”
The choice to privilege the study of linguistics turned out to be greatly auspicious; Radmila’s research in her primary fields of specialization – theoretical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and theories of grammar – would shape the direction of Serbocroatistica in her lifetime. Radmila’s profound contributions to the study and development of Serbian culture would be widely recognized and honored by students, colleagues, and dignitaries alike.
In addition to her monograph, “The System of the Concentration of Attention: The Semantic Organization of the Serbo-Croatian Verb” (1987), Radmila organized and edited several influential volumes of articles, academic essays, and Serbian short stories. In 1998, she published “The Prince of Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Short Stories,” which received widespread praise from PEN International, the Review of Contemporary Fiction, World Literature Today and other influential outlets. Her volume of stories by Ivo Andrić, “The Slave Girl and Other Stories about Women,” continues to be indispensable for international scholars of the Nobel Prize–winning author. Her 2013 edited volume, “After Yugoslavia: The Cultural Spaces of a Vanished Land,” serves as an extended meditation on the themes that preoccupied much of her academic work – identity, memory, exile, fragmentation, and the cultural afterlives of Yugoslavia.
Radmila’s contribution to South Slavic Studies at Columbia is immeasurable. She began in the University’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures in 1981, aside from a stint in Berkeley from 1986 to 1991, from where she received a Fulbright award to travel and lecture in Yugoslavia in 1986 and an ACLS grant to travel to Slovenia in 1991. Thereafter, she remained with Columbia until her retirement in 2013. In addition to conducting language courses in Serbo-Croatian at all levels, she taught a rotating slate of courses in literary and cultural studies – “Belgrade Writers: From Modernism to Post Modernism,” “Linguistic and Ethnic Conflicts in Former Yugoslavia,” “The Serbian Short Story,” and “Ideology, Identity, History: Yugoslav Prose” among others. She has written numerous research articles and reviews on linguistics and on Serbian literature. She is guest editor for an issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction dedicated to Milorad Pavic, which was published in 1998, and was president of the North American Society for Serbian Studies.
Within the Harriman Institute and its East Central European Center, Radmila was instrumental in enriching the study of South Slavic languages and literatures through her support of innovative academic programming. In 2010, Radmila organized an international conference, “E Unus Pluribum: Europe and Post-Yugoslav Cultural Spaces,” which brought together over 20 renowned scholars from around the world to discuss strategies for responding to, and overcoming, cultural difference and the challenges of globalization. Moreover, her efforts to cultivate and grow the Njegoš Endowment – a fund dedicated to supporting instruction and programming in Serbian language and culture – has ensured that Harriman students will continue to benefit from her tireless activity within the Institute for generations to come.
Radmila was a beloved teacher. Former students and colleagues never fail to praise her talent as a prodigious community builder – fostering a sense of inclusivity and belonging in the classroom and beyond. She was adept at synthesizing perspectives and making all voices feel valued. Her talent for uniting intellectual rigor with human warmth inspired a 2016 volume of essays “Scholarship as the Art of Life: Contributions on Serbian Literature, Culture, and Society by Friends of Radmila (Rajka) Gorup,” edited by her close friend and colleague Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover. As the volume’s title suggests, Radmila understood that academic work should be rooted in life and a shared sense of humanity, and she spent her life building a coalition of those who shared in these foundational values. While we mourn Radmila’s passing, let us not forget that her spirit still lives on through this expansive community of friends, family, former students, and colleagues – all those who were shaped by her life’s work.
May her memory be eternal!
Sources: The Harriman Institute and University of Pittsburgh Press
|  |
| ||||||||||||
