Svetlana Slapšak, born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1948. Ph.D. from the University of Belgrade. Director of the Programme of Gender Studies at the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Ljubljana.
Fellow (1 Sepember 1999 – 30 June 2000)
I came to stay as Fellow-in-Residence at NIAS for five months, and was then granted another semester in January. This made it possible for me to complete more work than originally planned and presented in my application.
As one of the editors on the project of rewriting comparative histories of literary cultures in Central and Eastern Europe (section Figural Nodes), I was able to commission and edit a total of 22 studies and to write my own contributions to this and to the other three sections.
During the first five months, I edited a collection of articles in the Anthropology of the Ancient Worlds, translated from French. On the initiative of the Dean of ISH (Ljubljana), the initially planned introduction grew into a book on the impact of historical anthropology on Ancient studies, its problems, history and reception in the region. The book was published in April 2000.
Before coming to NIAS, I started a series of popular anthropological essays entitled Women’s icons of the 20th century, for a Slovenian daily. At NIAS, I managed to finish the first set of 30 essays which were then published also as a book in April. On 2 July I will have sent the last of the second set of 30 essays, thus completing a second volume (to appear early in 2001), written entirely at NIAS.
I would like to stress the exceptional combination of access to the research facilities and of protection of personal space/ time offered to the researchers at NIAS.
I am glad to inform NIAS that in May 2000 I was awarded a Helmann-Hammett Grant from the New York based Human Rights Watch.