Matea Magdić was born in 1997 in Ogulin. In 2021, she earned a master’s degree in Comparative literature and Croatian language and literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. Since then, she has worked in middle schools in her hometown, and has found teaching to be her second passion, besides literature. Her fields of interest include versification, poststructuralism, the affective turn, older Croatian literature in context of European literature, and contemporary poetry.
As a member of REVENANT, her main interest is Renaissance-era Croatian literature about the Ottoman Empire and the connections of this literature to the world at large, both then and now. In particular, her project aims to grasp the thematic, structural, stylistic and symbolic levels of two notable works of Croatian literature: Vazetje Sigeta grada by Barne Karnarutić, and Osman by Ivan Gundulić. Both of these works illustrate and exemplify the ways in which literature remembered, and continues to remember, the great empires. These works also have at least one undeniable characteristic in common: at the center of narration is the ruler, who is at a certain moment executed, killed or captured, or loses his authority and power. Studying how different literary forms deal with the same theme, as well as how the narrative axis changes after the ruler’s fall, can provide interesting insights on the politics of representation and representation of politics. Her main research will therefore focus on literary strategies of representing the Ottoman Other, and how these representations and strategies have survived up to the present day in Croatia and beyond.