Biography

Vita Zalar is a historian and labour organizer with a particular interest in the history of capitalism, racialized and gendered primitive accumulation, and racialized labour regimes. She earned her PhD at the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. In her dissertation, she wrote about anti-Roma racism during the transition to capitalism in the Habsburg and Yugoslav monarchies from the 1840s until the 1940s.

As a Max Weber Fellow, Vita will be working on her first monograph, tentatively titled ‘The Political Economy of Anti-Roma Racism: Habsburg and Post-Habsburg Perspectives’, for which she received the 2023 Prize for Best First Book Proposal awarded by the BASEES Study Group for Minority History. At the EUI, Vita will also be developing a postdoctoral project that looks comparatively at the abolition of slavery and serfdom in Central Europe.

Before joining the EUI, Vita worked as an assistant at the University of Ljubljana and the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, a doctoral fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz, and a visiting researcher at the University of Graz and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Mentor

• Monika Baar