St. Louis is home to a large Bosnian diaspora, many members of which arrived in the early 1990s fleeing the violence of the Bosnian War. In 2007, in order to develop an undergraduate course, Fontbonne University professor Dr. Ben Moore began interviewing members of this diaspora. Soon after, the effort expanded into a community oral history project: local high school students, many of them second or third generation Bosnians themselves, collected and digitized oral histories from members of their own community. “Many young Bosnian Americans struggle to develop a narrative that connects them to Bosnia and to the United States,” Dr. Moore said. “The project is a way to assuage those feelings of cultural homelessness.” This effort eventually became the Bosnia Memory Project.

An NEH challenge grant in 2016 helped the project raise an additional $100,000 and enabled the project team to expand their archival and digitization capacities to make their collections more broadly accessible. They were able to purchase and digitize Bosnian publications from the St. Louis area, as well as other Bosnian-language documents including personal letters. The grant’s matching requirement also led the project directors to form stronger ties with community financial institutions, such as a bank, that helped make the project more sustainable and less dependent on continued fundraising.

Most importantly, the grant allowed the project to build capacity by providing funding for graduate student stipends and other staff, such as a Bosnian-American associate director who has since become the first director of the new Center for Bosnian Studies, which launched in 2020. The center will serve both as a site for scholarship as well as a custodian of Bosnian and Bosnian-American heritage.