e-mail: capo@ief.hr
Academic Jasna Čapo
Full Member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Department of Social Sciences
and Research Advisor at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb
Ethnologist, Jasna Čapo, Ph.D., was born in 1961 in Zagreb, where she finished elementary school and gymnasium. She graduated ethnology and French language and literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb (1984). She received her Master’s degree from the Department of Anthropology (1986) and her Ph.D. from the Department of Demography (1990) from the University of California, Berkeley (U.S.A.). She underwent postdoctoral training at the University of Strasbourg (1995) and at the University of Vienna (1996). She is the recipient of a scholarship from the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation in Germany (2001-2002, 2008, 2017).
Since 1986 she has been employed at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb, since 2006 as a scientific advisor in permanent position. At the Institute, she led the Institute’s research program, four domestic and two international scientific projects: on Croatian culture and traditions, returnee migrations and identification processes in the homeland and in diaspora, and on urban spaces. She is a member of the Board of Directors and a participant of the COST Action CA21143 “Transnational Familly Dynamics in Europe (TraFaDy)” (2022-2026). Since 2016 she has been a member of the Scientific Council of the Institute for Danube History and Culture in Tübingen (Institut für donauschwäbische Geschichte und Landeskunde).
She was elected full professor at Croatian Studies in 2006. She taught at (under-)graduate and doctoral studies, among other, of ethnology and cultural anthropology, sociology, Croatian culture, population history and medicine at the universities of Zagreb, Dubrovnik, Rijeka, Vienna and Ljubljana. She was a visiting professor at Université de Provence Aix-Marseille I and Université de Toulouse Le Mirail. She held individual lectures at universities or academies in France, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Sweden and Australia. She mentored about fifty bachelor’s, five master’s, and ten doctoral theses in Croatia, and was a member of committees for evaluating doctoral dissertations at universities in Melbourne, Paris, Nova Gorica, Ljubljana, and Aix-en-Provence. She is the co-author of a university textbook and co-editor of a university handbook. She is the winner of the State Prize for Science in 1998 and the award of the Croatian Ethnological Society for a scientific book (2007) and for the organization of the 12th Congress of the European Ethnological and Folklore Association (Société Internationale d’Ethnologie et de Folklore) in Zagreb (2015).
She gave five plenary presentations and about seventy presentations at ethnological congresses and conferences in the country and abroad. She is a reviewer of research projects for numerous foreign science foundations and for the European Research Council (member of the panel of social sciences and humanities for the evaluation of the Synergy Grant) and articles for renowned domestic and foreign academic journals. She is a member of the council of a number of international journals and professional associations.The opus of Jasna Čapo consists of six books (four authored, two co-authored), one edited book (published abroad), seven co-edited volumes (three published abroad), 103 original scientific papers in domestic and international journals and volumes (in Croatian, English, German, French, Russian, Bulgarian and Spanish), about fifty professional articles.With a constant interest in the history, theory and methodology of ethnology (ethnographic field work, qualitative research methods), she researched classic ethnological topics, reinterpreting them within the interdisciplinary horizon of historical ethnology and demography. Two syntheses of Croatian traditional culture and society stand out : the monographs Ethnography. Every day and Holiday of the Croatian People and Croatian Easter Customs, as well as the first analytical volume on ethnographic methodology (Ethnology of the Proximate). Combining ethnology and cultural anthropology with the sociology of family and migration, she has introduced new research topics into Croatian ethnology—refugee and labor migration, co-ethnic and return migration, research into Croatian identity in the past and present. Two books from that thematic area have been translated into English and German and published in the United States of America—an interdisciplinary study about the forced migration of Croats from Vojvodina to Croatia during the 1990s (Strangers Either Way. The Lives of Croatian Refugees in Their New Home) and in Germany, a capital monograph on the economic migration of Croats to Germany in the 1960s and its consequences over time (Zwei Zuhause. Kroatische Arbeitsmigration nach Deutschland als transnationales Phänomen). Also noteworthy is her involvement in editions in German and French, which contributed to the affirmation of Croatian ethnology in the international arena (Kroatische Volkskunde/Ethnologie in den Neunzigern; special issue of Ethnologie française: Croatie; special issue of Jahrbuch für Europäische Ethnologie: Kroatien). Bibliography