Guest

The linguist and cultural scientist Irina Sandomirskaya, professor at Södertörn University in Sweden, has been associated with the Institute of Slavic Studies for many years through her research work on Russian phraseology. In the 2020/21 academic year, she held a seminar on "Language in Communist Construction: Linguistics, Ideology, and Politics in the USSR" as a visiting professor.

Julia Cimafiejeva and Alhierd Bacharevič, two of the most prominent voices in modern Belarusian literature and 2020/21 Writers in Exile in Graz, discussed the current situation in Belarus in the context of remembrance culture, the protest movement, current trends in Belarusian literature, language and identity in an online lecture in March 2021.

From September 29 to October 1, 2022, the 18th conference of the Young Forum for Slavic Literary Studies took place at the Institute of Slavic Studies. The Graz organizing committee (Mariya Donska, Lisa Haibl, Felix Kohl, Goran Lazičić) welcomed 65 participants from 16 countries. With its diverse program, the conference was able to make a successful contribution to the international networking of young doctoral students and postdocs.

Transcultural, multilingual and political theater in Slovenia was the topic of a guest lecture by dramaturge, theater theorist and recipient of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the Republic of France Tomaž Toporišič (University of Ljubljana, Academy for Theater, Radio, Film and Television) on 23 May 2023 as part of the focus on theater and multilingualism. As dramaturge and artistic director at the Slovensko mladinsko gledališče, Toporišič has been involved in groundbreaking theater productions.

The cultural scientist Alexander Etkind was one of our guests at the international conference Green Cultures in Eastern Europe (June 28-30, 2023). Etkind, who researches intellectual history, memory cultures in Eastern Europe, questions of political economy, colonialism and contemporary Russia, gave the keynote lecture "Russia's War Against the Global Environment".

On 16.11.2023, the Slovenian poet, writer and storyteller Anja Štefan was a guest at Slavic Studies in cooperation with the Center for Slovenian as a Second or Foreign Language. She is one of the best-known children's book authors in her country and has received numerous awards for her work. Most recently, she was the first children's and young adult author to receive the Prešeren Fund Prize, the most important national prize for artistic creation.

Yuri Andrukhovych, born in Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine, presented his latest novel at the Literaturhaus Graz (in cooperation with the Institute of Slavic Studies) on November 28, 2022. Mariya Donska moderated the discussion with the co-founder of the legendary literary performance group Bu-Ba-Bu and one of the best-known contemporary European authors.

A special event for us was the workshop "Experimental Methods in Slavic Linguistics". Our guest was Bojana Ristić from the University of Ljubljana, who gave a training course on the use of eye-tracking in research on Slavic languages as a guest lecturer.

Another highlight was the lecture by Predrag Kovačević from the University of Novi Sad entitled "The status of verbal theme vowels in contemporary linguistic theorizing: some recent Developments". Dr. Kovačević presented his new quantitative and theoretical research on the nature of theme vowels in BKS material.

Our guests also helped to present the diversity of Slavic research. For example, Berit Gehrke from the Humboldt University of Berlin gave a presentation at the Graz Linguistics Colloquium entitled "Aspeclecticism" on an approach to Slavic verbal aspect that she is currently developing.

Maja Milicevic-Petrovic from the University of Bologna devoted her presentation to the question: "What makes the meaning of two texts similar? Linguistic phenomena behind cross-level semantic similarity in Serbian". The lecture was based on her research in the field of computational and corpus linguistics.

Ursula Doleschal from the University of Klagenfurt contributed with her lecture "The conditions of uninflectability in nouns in the Slavic languages" to deepen our understanding of the invariability of nouns in Slavic languages.

The relationship between the phonological form of words and their internal structure in a decompositional approach to morphophonology based on data from different languages was the topic of the presentation "Phonological exponents and allomorphy: the decompositional approach" by Nicola Lampitellis from the University of Tours (CNRS).

Matej Šekli (University of Ljubljana) conducts research in the fields of comparative linguistics of Slavic languages and dialectology. After the Slovenian Slavic Congress 2020, which took place in Graz and Maribor, he was co-editor of the subsequent anthology "Slovenski jezik in književnost v srednjeevropskem prostoru". The collaboration was resumed in the winter semester 2023, when he gave a guest lecture entitled "Resianisch - Dialekt oder Sprache?". The lecture highlighted the characteristics of the language in the Resia Valley and the social circumstances that shape it. During his guest appearance, Matej Šekli initiated the translation of the information boards of the Resian Museum (Muzej rezijanskih ljudi) into German, which was subsequently carried out by the students (Sara Šalamun, Anna-Maria Javornik and Patrick Sanio). They were supported by their mentors Helga Benigni-Cokan, Tatjana Koren and Laura Fekonja Fonteyn.