Ana Ilievska

Name and Surname
Ana Ilievska

Affiliation
American University of Beirut – Mediterraneo

Short Biography

Ana Ilievska is Assistant Professor of Global Liberal Arts at the American University of Beirut–Mediterraneo. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago (2020). Previously Senior Research Fellow on the Bonn–Cambridge project on “Desirable Digitalisation,” she also taught at Stanford University as a Lecturer and Stanford Humanities Center Mellon postdoctoral fellow. Her research examines late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Southern European and Mediterranean literature and thought in relation to hegemony and modernity, with a particular interest in how literary and philosophical texts can illuminate contemporary debates on technology and the human. Her publications include Humanism in the Age of AI (forthcoming in June 2026), editor; Pirandello and Alienation: Man, Modernity, Technology (2025), coeditor; anthology of Contemporary Sicilian Poetry (2023), coeditor and translator; Italian Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence (forthcoming in 2027), coeditor. She is also the translator of Maurizio Ferraris’s Webfare (2024) and Rita Dove’s Playlist for the Apocalypse (2024).

Research abstract

The research project, part of a manuscript in progress, examines how the Yugoslav Praxis philosophers’ understanding of praxis can illuminate forms of alienation that have become ordinary, invisible, and technologically mediated today. Working in the archives of the Praxis school, it focuses on thinkers such as Gajo Petrović, Milan Kangrga, Mihailo Marković, and Miladin Životić, asking what remains intellectually and politically vital in their vision of the human as a being of free, creative, and self-transformative activity. Bringing this tradition into conversation with contemporary conditions shaped by algorithmic abstraction, the project explores how alienation now affects knowledge, action, and social relations in new ways. It argues that Praxis thought remains an important resource for rethinking agency, responsibility, and ethical-political transformation in the present.