SOAR - Slovenia Chapter
Slovenia joined the SOAR family in April 2022. The Republic of Slovenia is located in Central Europe and is bordered by Italy to the west, Austria to the north, Hungary to the northeast, Croatia to the southeast, and the Adriatic Sea to the southwest. Slovenia is mostly mountainous and forested with a population of 2.1 million. Slovenes constitute more than 80% of the country’s population. Slovenia has historically been the crossroads of Slavic, Germanic, and Romance languages and cultures. In June 1991, Slovenia became the first republic to split from Yugoslavia and become an independent sovereign state. Slovenia is a developed country with a high-income economy ranking in the Human Development Index. It is a member of the United Nations, the European Union, the Schengen Area, the Council of Europe, and NATO.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS:
Giustina Selvelli
President
Giustina Selvelli (Trieste, 1984) a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology, University of Ljubljana. She is a specialist in the languages and heritage of ethnolinguistic minorities, nationalism and diaspora communities in the wider Eastern European region. She has obtained a MA in Anthropology and Ethnolinguistics (2012, with a minor in Armenian Studies. Thesis Supervision: Prof. Boghos Levon Zekiyan) and a PhD in Slavic Studies (2017, Thesis Supervision: Prof. Aleksander Naumow), both from Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, Italy. She has held positions at the University of Klagenfurt (Austria), the University of Nova Gorica (Slovenia), the University of Novi Sad (Serbia), the University of the Aegean in Mytilene (Greece), and the Balkar Institute for Balkan and Black Sea Studies at Yildiz University in Istanbul, where she conducted research and taught courses/seminars on ethnolinguistic groups in the Balkans, with a focus on the Armenian diaspora. She has published many articles on the topic of the Armenian diaspora of Plovdiv, based on her long ethnographic fieldwork with the local community. Her monograph Language Attitudes, Collective Memory and (Trans)National Identity Construction Among the Armenian Diaspora in Plovdiv has just been published with Peter Lang.