Biography

Zala Pavšič obtained her Ph.D. in Cultural History from the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Her thesis was devoted to the discourses of friendship in relation to the disintegration of Yugoslavia. In a broader sense, she is interested in the contemporary history of Southeast Europe, the formation and erasure of cultural memories, oral history and gender studies.

At the EUI, Zala intends to challenge the existing research, which repetitively connects women and the discourse of war (in Yugoslavia) with rape, and suggest a shift towards establishing a connection with researching the role of women in the discourse of war within the framework of friendship. Her goal is to examine the hypothesis that if wartime rapes were interpreted as a means of exercising male nationalism upon women and upon other nations, the discourse of friendship could have the capacity to overcome nationalism and even empower women within the said discourse.

Zala is the recipient of numerous Slovenian, Russian and American grants and fellowships. She spent the final year of her bachelor degree as a grantee of the Russian Government at Herzen University in Sankt-Peterburg. She has also established herself as a promising Slovenian literary translator, especially with her translations of the Russian poetry of Mikhail Lermontov and Osip Mandelstam.

Expertise for Teaching and Mentoring of Ph.D. Researchers
Zala has experience teaching an undergraduate course of contemporary history.