Irena Avsenik Nabergoj

Irena Avsenik Nabergoj is a research fellow and a full professor of religious studies and of the anthropology of religion at the University of Ljubljana (Faculty of Theology)’s Institute of the Bible, Judaism and Early Christianity; a research fellow at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts’ Research Centre’s Institute of Cultural History; and a full professor of literature at the University of Nova Gorica’s Faculty of Humanities and of Slovenian literature at the University of Maribor’s Faculty of Arts. She earned a PhD degree in literary studies at the Faculty of Arts in 2004 and a further one in theology (in Bible and Judaism studies) at the Ljubljana University’s Faculty of Theology in 2015. She has given lectures at a number of universities and scientific research associations in Europe, USA and Canada, including: the universities of Udine, of Verona and of Calabria, Italy; Charles University of Prague, Czech Republic; University of Iaş, Romania; University of Toulon, France; the universities of Klagenfurt and of Graz, Austria (2015); Umeå University, Sweden; University of Aberdeen, Scotland; University of Zürich, Switzerland; University of Gdansk, Poland; the universities of Mainz and of Hamburg, Germany. As a member of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL), she has lectured in Philadelphia (in 2006, 2009, 2020, 2021), New York (in 2022), Chicago (in 2007, 2014), San Francisco (in 2008, 2017), Seattle (in 2012), Boston (in 2013), Vancouver (in 2015) and Austin (in 2016). She has given a significant number of lectures at the International Medieval Congresses organised yearly by the University of Leeds, England (i.e., in 2010, 2011, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2022). In her research, she mainly focuses on Slovenian and comparative literature, the Bible and Judaism. She has published, in Slovenia and internationally, around one hundred research papers and fourteen scholarly monographs. As a visiting researcher, she has spent ten significant periods of time at the University of Cambridge. She received the Slovenian national Zois Distinction for a vital contribution to literary studies in 2009, and was also distinguished by having being elected in 2015 a full member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, Class I – the Humanities.