Alumni Win Milena Jesenská Fellowships

The Czech journalist Milena Jesenaska died in Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944

Two alumni of the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence - Ivan Angelovski from Belgrade and Marius Cosmeanu from Bucharest - have been selected to take part in the prestigious Milena Jesenská Fellowship for Journalists.

The award will see Angelovski and Cosmeanu take time out of their current employment and spend three months at Vienna’s Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Institute for Human Sciences), as they pursue funded research into topics of their choice.

The fellowship, supported by ERSTE Foundation and partner organisations, provides a stipend of around €7,630, office space and research facilities. Travel grants of up to €1,820 can be applied for in order to conduct research in neighbouring countries.

For more information, visit the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen website:
http://www.iwm.at/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=80&Itemid=153

Ivan Angelovski, who currently works for the Serbian TV station B92, will conduct further research into his BFJE project on sexual abuse within the Western and Eastern Christian Churches. He intends to work from Vienna from October to December 2011.

Read his original fellowship article, Serbian Church Accused of Sex Abuse Cover-Up.

“During six months of work on fellowship article, the question of how religious people reacted to the allegations emerged, and I decided to investigate its impact on religion. I am glad that I will have a chance to look more closely into that direction now, Angelovski said.

Marius Cosmeanu, who currently works for Romania’s CULT Maganzine, will be in Vienna from January to March 2012. He will be researching a project he calls ‘The Alchemy of the Last Meal: The Culture of Capital Punishment in Eastern and Western Europe’.

More than two decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the story of capital punishment in Central and Eastern Europe remains untold – even taboo.

“Former hangmen, members of firing squads, lawyers, witnesses and relatives of sentenced people from the region survived and are living among us. They are potential resources for my project. Also, I intend to compare the topic in the East and West,” Cosmeanu said.

In 2011, journalists from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey were, for the first time, also eligible to apply. The fellowships are intended as an award for excellence and are for experienced journalists only.

Milena Jesenská was a Czech journalist and editor who worked with the underground resistance during the Nazi occupation. She was arrested and died in Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944.