Join the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (CSEEES) for a special guest lecture with Slovene Research Initiative Faculty Exchange Fellow Miha Zobec who will discuss the new book Daring Dreams of the Future. This event will take place over Zoom, so please register using the link below.
Abstract: In the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, almost half a million people (nearly a third of the population) left today’s Slovenia, one of the smallest nations in Europe. Many more were traveling back and forth, searching for work to ensure the survival of the family members left behind at home and the prosperity for the families and communities they were creating abroad. This book tells their stories, about the "daring dreams of the future," as the Slovenian poet Oton Župančič— whose words open the book—so beautifully put it. The people who left took recipes for their foods, accordions for their music, and love for their culture and language, which was, and has remained, a linguistic island between Vienna and Venice. In their new communities, they built homes, churches, and cultural institutions that have survived until today. In addition to presenting the book’s content, the book launch will also display migrants’ life-stories, as documented by Zobec during his stay in Cleveland this September.
Speaker: Miha Zobec is a research associate at the Slovenian Migration Institute, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and an assistant professor at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Primorska. His research interests include relations between migration and nation-building processes in the contexts of two Yugoslavias, the study of migration policies, migration control, diasporas, and the history of the family in migration settings. He has published several scholarly articles both in Slovenia and abroad, as well as a monograph on translocal connections between a village on the Slovene Karst and its emigrants in Argentina. Zobec obtained scholarships for conducting research at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg (2019) and at the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies at Ohio State University (September 2024).
If you have any questions about accessibility or wish to request accommodations, please contact us at cseees@osu.edu. Typically, a two weeks' notice will allow us to provide access.