Taja Kramberger

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Taja Kramberger : biography

11 September 1970 –

Critical Reflexivity of the Slovenian Historiography

Kramberger has also started with the extensive categorical critical reflexivity in the field of history in Slovenia, and has released many angry reactions in the history field, but mostly she left the historians – unable to confront its own shadows from the past – silenced. Although polemic, which would definitely clarify the discipline’s past erratic wanderings and amnesias and an almost total theoretic oblivion in the field of history in Slovenia, is not a usual tool of scientific communication in these regions, it is nevertheless clear that Taja Kramberger has opened (among some other researchers, such as Drago Braco Rotar, Rastko Močnik, Maja Breznik, Lev Centrih, Primož Krašovec, in a small, theoretically much less pertinent part also Marta Verginella and Oto Luthar) an important segment of future debates, which are needed to elucidate some of the neglected and spontaneously transmitted chapters of the Slovenian (distinctly ethnocentric and Sonderweg) history.

Representations and aspects of the Dreyfus Affair in the Slovenophone World

Taja Kramberger was also the first Slovenian historian who had written with a great perspicacity about various dimensions of the Dreyfus Affair in the Slovenian social space :fr:Espace (sciences sociales). She has opened up a complex theme strangely neglected and connected to the categories and imaginary :fr:Imaginaire structure of anti-Semitism in the country with not many Jewish people, but nonetheless with strong mechanisms of social exclusion. In the frames of this theme she directed – together with her students in 2007/2008 – an ample exhibition on the Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906), showing its entangled European context, its highly important civic extensions, and its specific reception in the continental Slovenian space and in Trieste, mostly based on spontaneous anti-Semitism. The exhibitions was set up and shown to the public in Koper (2008), Trieste (2009) and Maribor (2010).

Apart from many fresh intellectual ideas and innovations (for the Slovenian circumstances and intellectual coordinates, but very likely also in a wider sense) Taja Kramberger has written many critical articles on various aspects of Slovenian history, cultural life, but also on broader European History and culture, e. g. on Spanish Civil War, different models of Enlightenment in Europe and the recurrent Enlightenment features in the works of Anton Tomaž Linhart, on epistemic divergence between Enlightenment’s and Historismus’s :de:Historismus (Geschichtswissenschaft)paradigms of historiography, on anthropology of translation, history of university and the formation of university habitus :fr:Habitus (sociologie), on literary and cultural fields :fr:Pierre Bourdieu#Théorie des champs in the 1930s in Slovenia (by then partially covered by the administrative unit of Dravska banovina) and on the role of women in the constitution of these fields etc.

Bourdieuian Studies in the frames of Slovenia

Her intellectual trajectory is partly connected to the Bourdieuian perspective and apparatus in social sciences. She has written about Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, translated some of their texts (as a guest editor of the journal Družboslovne razprave, no. 43, 2003), and in 2006 edited a monograph titled Principles of Reflexive Social Science and for a Critical Investigation of Symbolic Dominations (Načela za refleksivno družbeno znanost in kritično preučevanje simbolnih dominacij) (in Slovenian, together with Drago Braco Rotar). She held lectures – among other subjects – on Bourdieuian approach, instrumentarium and methodology at the University of Primorska in Koper.

Biography

Born in Ljubljana, but lived in her childhood (between age 4 and 11) at the seaside – in the bilingual town of Koper-Capodistria near Trieste. She has finished there 4 years of primary school (Pinko Tomažič), and then moved with a family to Ljubljana, where she has finished primary and secondary school Gimnazija Bežigrad. She obtained BA from history at the University of Ljubljana (1997), and took the position of a postgraduate young researcher at the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis (abr. ISH) in Ljubljana. After the transition changes, when lucrative and socially applicable science was placed in the first plan at the ISH, she has left the institution (2004), and moved to Koper-Capodistria, where a new University of Primorska has started its route. She still lives and works in Koper. She is married to Drago Braco Rotar, Slovenian sociologist, historical anthropologist and translator.