Mitja Velikonja

Mitja Velikonja was born in Slovenia in 1956. He is a professor of cultural studies at the University of Ljubljana. His monographs include „Post-Socialist Political Graffiti in the Balkans and Central Europe“ and „The Chosen Few – Aesthetics and Ideology in Football-Fan Graffiti and Street Art“, which was among the finalists for the American Next Generation Indie Book Awards in 2022. The book of essays „Ukrainian Vignettes – Essays on the Culture of the Nearby War“, based on three trips to Ukraine in 2023 and 2024, was nominated for the Slovene Book of the Year Award in 2024 and for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards in 2026. As a full-time visiting professor, he taught at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Columbia University in New York, the University of Rijeka, the New York Institute in Saint Petersburg, and Yale University. As a Fulbright visiting researcher, he was at Rosemont College near Philadelphia, and as a full-time visiting scholar at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, the Remarque Institute at New York University, and Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. For his work, he has received six national and two international awards.