Grand Danube Passage

Zrinka Stahuljak grew up in Zagreb, capital of Croatia, known as “little Vienna” and infused with the legacy of the turn-of-the-20th century spirit of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in cuisine, manners, and a linguistic mix (German, Yiddish, Croatian, but also Italian). Intrigued by the history of the region, Zrinka Stahuljak was drawn to the study of the Middle Ages, a formative period for European early modern and modern identities and nations. She is the author of 7 books and numerous articles on topics ranging from the 11th to the 16th century. Her latest book “Fixers” (2024) expands the analysis of translators and interpreters beyond the purely linguistic function to show that bilingual communication is a history of multifunctional agents who act as local informants, guides, brokers, personal assistants, enablers, facilitators and more. She serves as Director of UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies (since 2019). She has been engaged in public humanities, such as the collaborations with the J. Paul Getty Museum and a TV show on the Holy Grail that aired on the French-German channel ARTE. She has held visiting professorships at the Collège de France (2018), the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (2023), and the Université-Rennes 2 (2016), as well as in Iceland (2022) and Taiwan (2022). Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim (2016), Fulbright (2013), and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2005-06). In 2020, she was elected corresponding member to the Croatian Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is currently Principal Investigator on a major Mellon Foundation grant that compares medieval and Indigenous historical knowledge-making (2023-2026).