Grad student searches for answers about her homeland

Some might call it fate. As a child of eight, Ira Kurtagic fled the war raging in her native Bosnia. Today, she is one of Gerard Toal’s graduates, with a master’s of public and international affairs (MPIA).

Her route to Virginia Tech’s Alexandria campus was somewhat circuitous. Leaving Bosnia, Kurtagic, her sister, and their mother went to Germany, where they remained for the next four years. Her father, department head for a medical facility, stayed behind and fought in Bosnia. When he was wounded (as a civilian), he was allowed to leave the country for rehabilitation. He chose a center in Chicago, where he had relatives, and it was there that the family reunited.

Though Kurtagic left her native country at such a young age, she says she feels very connected to her homeland and has always been “personally in search of answers about what really happened in Bosnia and what the country and its people must do to survive. The Bosnian war was a terrible, and complicated, war; it’s not easy to understand,” she says. Almost every summer since 1998, Kurtagic has gone back to Bosnia to learn as much as she can about her homeland. “Over the years there have been drastic changes in both attitudes and demographics,” she says.

With an undergraduate degree in political science and international studies from Loyola University in Chicago, Kurtagic began working at the Bosnian consulate in Chicago. She quickly realized that she would need a greater knowledge of political science to progress in her field. When a friend e-mailed her information about a graduate assistantship available at Virginia Tech, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. “Because of Dr. Toal’s well-regarded expertise about Bosnia, it was a very appealing idea for me to move to Northern Virginia and join the program,” she says. “He is a great professor because he covers global conflicts in a deconstructed, unbiased way that was very helpful to me as I conducted my own personal research.”

Kurtagic did her thesis on “Did Sarajevo’s multiethnic spatiality survive? An analysis of an urban core residential building through war and peace.” (http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ theses/available/etd-05182007-221928/ To write her thesis, Kurtagic interviewed about 15 people in one building in Sarajevo to determine how their lives and their relationships have changed during the past 15 years.

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Ira Kurtagic says she is "personally in search of answers about what really happened in Bosnia." Photo by Josh Armstrong.