Brigitte Le Normand

Brigitte Le Normand, a native of the city of Montreal Canada, holds a Bachelor of Arts in History from McGill University (2000) and a Master of Arts in Russian and East European studies from the University of Toronto (2002). For her Masters research she focused on the representation of the Second World War in Croatian school textbooks, later expanding the project to compare Croatian and Serbian textbooks. In 2002 she joined the History program at the University of California, Los Angeles, obtaining a Master of Arts in 2004 and a Ph.D. in the summer of 2007 under the supervision of Ivan Berend. In 2005-2006, she was a visiting fellow of the Institute for the Recent History of Serbia, in Belgrade.

Her dissertation research was funded by a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Entitled "Raising the Phoenix: the Wax and Waning of Modernist Urban Planning in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 1945-1972," it investigated the role of various actors in shaping urban planning policy in Yugoslavia's capital during a period of rapid social change. Her research shows how Yugoslavia's policy-makers saw Modernism in architecture and urban planning as a means of forcing through cultural and economic modernization. However, the profound social and economic transformations set in motion by Tito's regime - including the arrival of impoverished peasants in the city, on the one hand, and the rise in the standard of living, on the other - put a serious strain on urban planning projects, eventually discrediting the Modernist vision of the late 1940s and 1950s. She discusses some of her findings in a recent article in East Central Europe, and in an upcoming issue of Informationen zur Modernen Stadtgeschichte on Southern European cities.

While a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, Dr. Le Normand investigated the impact of Yugoslav labor migrants working in German and Austria on consumer practices and culture within Yugoslavia in the 1960s.

Her interests include urban history, the history of state-socialism, transnational history and the related topics of identity, ethnicity and nationalism.