PhD Anja Moric
no.: 50830

Anja Moric is a political scientist, ethnologist, and cultural anthropologist. Her research focuses on identity processes within minority communities, relations between minorities and majorities, nationalism, (forced) migration, memory politics, and heritagisation processes. She pays particular attention to the German-speaking community in Slovenia and in the diaspora, the Kočevje region, and other border or multicultural areas. She graduated (2007) and earned her PhD (2016) in Political Science at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. For her dissertation on Slovene Germans in the diaspora, she received the Professor Klinar Award. She complemented her studies with a degree in Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana (2024). Between 2017 and 2025, she was employed at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, and between 2019 and 2025 at the Institute of Ethnomusicology ZRC SAZU. She led the basic research project The Weight of the Past: Heritage of Multicultural Regions – The Case of Kočevje (2022–2025, ARIS), the student project Ethnological Collection of Gottscheers and a Walking Trail among Old Fruit Tree Varieties (2023, UL), and two bilateral projects with the partners from USA and Croatia. Her research is primarily conducted among Gottscheers and members of the German-speaking community in Slovenia, Austria, the USA, and Canada. She also participates in studies of the Roma community and Slovene minorities abroad (Austrian Styria, Val Canale, the Kolpa and Čabranka Valleys). In 2023 and 2024, she was a visiting researcher at the Institut für deutsche Kultur und Geschichte Südosteuropas in Munich, Germany. Since 2016, she has been the head of the Putscherle Institute, where she designs and coordinates projects on the interpretation and preservation of cultural heritage in the Kočevje region. She is the author of four and co-author of several exhibitions. She has produced three ethnographic films, including We Feel It Deep in Our Hearts (2018), which follows the life stories of Gottscheers in Slovenia, Austria, the USA, and Canada. For children, she has prepared four books on the cultural heritage of the broader Kočevje area, with accompanying texts for parents and educators. She is the editor and author of the blog Kočevski b(r)log: www.kocevskibrlog.com. She is active in professional bodies: a member of the Committee for the Study of National Minorities at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SAZU) (since 2024), a member of the Council of JSKD IO Kočevje (since 2020), a member of the Executive Board of the Slovene Ethnological Society (2017–2024), and head of its Working Group for Slovenians Abroad (2019–2024). For her contribution to preserving the cultural heritage of Kočevje region, she received recognition from the Gottscheer Heritage and Genealogy Association (USA, 2018, 2022) and the Mayor’s Plaque of the Municipality of Kočevje (2018).