Deana Jovanovic is a Social Anthropologist (PhD, University of Manchester) whose research focuses on how people engage with futures in the context of environmental and infrastructural struggles in industrial towns. Her research is based on long term ethnographic research in industrial urban environments in former Yugoslav region. Deana is assistant professor at Cultural Anthropology (Utrecht University). 

Deana’s research focuses on mundane engagements with futures and how they intersect with the prodduction of different kinds of power. She explores how conjunctions between the futures and “the state” appear through various 'sites' of political, social and economic contentions, such as heating and electricity infrastructures, urban spaces, labour regimes, unemployment, the promise of mineral extraction, and pollution bodies and air. With her work Deana contributes to the research group Sovereignty and Social Contestation (SoSCo) at Cultural Anthropology department at Utrecht University. 

Before joining Utrecht University, Deana held various postdoctoral positions: DAAD-Leibniz Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg (Germany) (2018), Sociological Review Postdoctoral Fellowship at Keele University (UK) (2017/18), Visiting Senior Research Fellowship at the School of Environment, Education and Development (SEED) at University of Manchester (2018), and Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Centre for Advanced Studies at the University of Rijeka (Croatia) (2017). Deana also worked as Research Associate at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (University of Belgrade) in Serbia.

Deana’s areas of expertise (and supervision) is broadly in the following fields: anthropology of futures, anthropology of the state, urban infrastructures, anthropology of industry, mining and deindustrialization, post-socialist transformations, industrial towns and urban spaces, environment and risk, feminist theory and gender.