By the time Dijana Mujkanović (PhD '26) was a teenager, she was already doing the work that would define her career—even if she didn’t have a name for it yet. She'd arrived in the United States with her family in 1999, fleeing the aftermath of the Bosnian War and settling in St. Louis, Missouri when she was thirteen years old. Within two years, she was translating for community members at doctor's appointments and helping new arrivals navigate an unfamiliar system.
“In many ways, my activism and work in the community started from the age of 15," she said.
Her early experiences living through ethnic conflict and helping other immigrant families find their footing in a new country would eventually shape the question that drives her scholarship: how ordinary people form and sustain relationships across ethnic lines in deeply divided societies. It's a question Mujkanović spent years studying at Pitt, and one she'll keep pursuing as Weatherhead Scholar at Harvard University.
Mujkanović will begin a yearlong appointment as a Raphael Morrison Dorman Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs this fall. The fellowship is among the most selective postdoctoral opportunities in international affairs, admitting about 5% of applicants in a typical year, and supports independent research from social scientists across disciplines. Mujkanović will join an interdisciplinary cohort of roughly thirty visiting faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and practitioner fellows in residence at the Center, building upon the work she did at Pitt in new and exciting ways.
"The part that appeals to me the most about this next step is that I get to continue the research I care so much about,” she said. “Even beyond transitioning my dissertation into a manuscript that I hope to publish, which is of course exciting, I’ll be able to dive deeper into specific subgroups I’ve come across and the ways in which their personal networks manifest along characteristics that are unlike other people in those societies."
Mujkanović earned her doctorate from the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) at the University of Pittsburgh, where she spent more than a year and a half conducting fieldwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Israel for her dissertation, "Personal Cross-Ethnic Networks in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Israel: Structure, Meaning, and Relational Orientation." The project combines ethnographic and survey methods to explain how ordinary people in deeply divided societies build and sustain relationships across ethnic lines, and why some manage it while others don't.
It was only after spending nearly a decade as a practitioner working on human and civil rights issues, much of it with immigrant and refugee communities in the United States and later in Israel, that Mujkanović decided to come back to academia.
"I realized from my world of practice that I am a conceptual person," she said. "My main passion was thinking through these subjects, analyzing them, and seeing how to better instruct the creation of programs and initiatives."
Her conviction that her research should be useful and reach beyond the classroom is what drew her to SPIA over other programs.
"I could have done a more traditional political science program, for instance, where it would in many ways have felt like research for research's sake," she said. "For me, I deeply believe that my academic work has to have real-world application. I don’t think everyone’s research needs to be that way, but without that I don't think I would get the impetus to care about it sufficiently."
She points to the support she found across several of Pitt's area studies centers, including the European Studies Center, the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the Global Studies Center, as well as a Nationality Rooms scholarship, as proof that opportunity at SPIA rarely comes from just one place.
"It's been a concerted kind of effort," she said. “There are quite a few people that have been really instrumental in this process for me, and I’m so grateful for those who helped me get to this point in my career and continue to support my work.”
One example of that support is tied directly to her participation in the Weatherhead fellowship, a program to which she almost didn’t apply. She knew the odds were long, and the work of finishing a dissertation while preparing postdoc applications was already considerable. What changed her mind was advice she'd picked up while working with Josh Cannon, Director of Research in Pitt’s David C. Frederick Honors College on previous scholarship applications: applying, she was told, takes you from a zero percent chance to a real one.
“It seems silly,” she said, “but he was right. It really changed the way I thought about the effort, and what a disadvantage it would be not to go after something just because it was a small chance.”
It's advice that ties full circle to a fifteen-year-old translating for strangers at doctor's appointments: show up, do the work, and let the rest follow. For SPIA students eyeing opportunities that feel out of reach, Mujkanović hopes her path is proof that the only real disqualifier is never trying.
Learn more about the PhD program at SPIA.