08/21/2026
How does a place become a symbol of history?
As preparation for his Outliers course (POLI:3426), Professor Ron McMullen traveled to Bosnia this summer to explore how history, memory, and identity shape political life.
📍 In Sarajevo, he visited the corner where Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, an event that sparked World War I (Photo 1). He also visited Princip's burial site, where he and his co-conspirators are memorialized as "Heroes" in a Serbian Orthodox chapel and mausoleum (Photo 2).
📍 McMullen also explored Sarajevo's 1984 Winter Olympic bobsled track overlooking the city (Photo 3). Just a decade later, during the Siege of Sarajevo, nearby positions were used by Serb forces to target the city. He visited the market where a 1994 mortar attack killed more than 60 civilians, now marked by a red-painted memorial at the impact site (Photo 4).
📍 In Banja Luka, capital of the Republika Srpska, Bosnia's Serb-majority entity, McMullen examined how competing historical narratives continue to shape the region (Photo 5). He visited a memorial honoring 26,000 Army of the Republika Srpska soldiers who died during the Bosnian War of the 1990s (Photo 6).
Through firsthand experiences at these historic sites, McMullen brings complex questions of conflict, memory, and political identity into the classroom.
