ACADEMIC PROFILE

Vera holds an Education degree and a Master of Library of Information Science degree from Western University. She is pursuing a PhD in Digital History at the University of Waterloo and works under the supervision of Dr. Ian Milligan. Her research focuses on the digitization of the Black freedom struggles in Canada and the United States during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

As a doctoral researcher, Vera examines the construction of cultural memory and ever-changing digital archives. She is particularly interested in which historical documents are prioritized for digitization and how this affects the creation and interpretation of events. She is also interested in advancing interdisciplinary cooperation and preserving cultural heritage through the digitization of microfilm newspapers.

Vera is engaged in a project that examines how propaganda during the Yugoslav Wars deliberately shaped public perception and helped construct enduring narratives of the conflict. Her research traces how coordinated misinformation campaigns manufactured fear, identity, and political legitimacy at key moments of state collapse. These wartime narratives ultimately became embedded in cultural memory, influencing how communities continue to remember and interpret the war today. She is also working on a manuscript dedicated to the women of the Croatian Spring.

SELECTED AWARDS

Doctoral Canada Graduate Scholarship awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, 2024-2027.

President’s Graduate Scholarship from the University of Waterloo, 2024-2027.

RECENT TALKS

‘’A Digital Pedagogy of Experiential Learning: Advancing the Collaborative Liberation of Microfilm Newspapers and Disrupting the Silo Metaphor,” Canadian Society for Digital Humanities, Congress, Montreal, Quebec, June 2024.

‘’The Black Women’s United Front: ‘Forward with the Struggle,’ New Frontiers Graduate Student Conference. York University, Toronto, Ontario, January 2024.

CURRENT PROJECTS

Women of the Croatian Spring: Memory, Repression, and Transnational Resistance, 1965–1980.

Divergent Memories: Digital History and the Black Freedom Struggles in Canada and the United States, 1960-2020. University of Waterloo, 2025.

INTERESTS

• Digital History
• Cold War
• Disability Studies
• Gender Studies
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computational Text Analysis

Connect with me:

vera.zoricic@uwaterloo.ca

© 2025 Vera Zoricic. All rights reserved.