Millicent (BOBA) Vladiv-Glover

MAC.ROB student, 1959-1962
PORTRAIT GALLERY INDUCTEE, 2026
BA Hon; MA; PhD
Lecturer, Journal Editor, Academic Author

Millicent, known at school as Boba, was born in Belgrade and came to Australia in 1958 as a refugee from communist Yugoslavia. At Mac.Robertson Girls High School, she enrolled in French and German, Musical Appreciation, Literature and History, which she completed as Dux of School in Humanities in her Matriculation Year 1962. She joined the School orchestra, choir and madrigal, and scored a small solo part in the School production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance.

She graduated from the University of Melbourne with a BA Honours degree in Russian, German and French, (1967), an MA (1969) and a PhD (1975). From 1970, Millicent lectured at Monash University in the Department of Russian and Slavic and in the Center for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies and retired in 2013 as Associate Professor.

She specialised in literary Structuralism and theory of the novel, applied to Fyodor Dostoevsky, but also investigated broader cultural  paradigms of Realism, Modernism and Postmodernism in various Slavic languages. Her research produced 8 monographs and over 100 refereed articles and chapters in books. 

She supervised honours and higher degrees research theses. She was chief editor of A-class academic journals: The Dostoevsky Journal: A Comparative Literature Review (Brill), Transcultural Studies: A Series in Interdisciplinary Research (Brill), Serbian Studies (www.serbianstudies.org) (Slavica Publishers), and guest editor of Studies in East European Thought (Springer).

For Millicent, the four years at Mac.Rob were the foundation of her intellectual life. The School’s ethics of self-discipline and the antecedents of a Classical European education or Bildung inspired Millicent’s never-ending quest for knowledge as a spiritual good to be transmitted to others. In this, the wonderful MacRob teachers and Head Mistress, Miss Daphne Barrett, played no small part.