Jože Pirjevec


Jože Pirjevec, italianised Giuseppe Pierazzi, is a Slovene-Italian historian and a prominent diplomatic historian of the west Balkans region, as well as a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Biography

He was born in a Slovene-speaking family in Trieste, Italy. His younger sister, Marija, became a translator and literary scholar. After World War II, the family moved from Yugoslavia to the Free Territory of Trieste. In 1966, he graduated from history at the University of Trieste and in 1971 at the University of Pisa. He continued his studies at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna. In 1977, he obtained his PhD in Ljubljana under the supervision of historian Fran Zwitter. He initially researched the relations between Italy and the South Slavic peoples during the Risorgimento in mid 19th century. He continued with research on Russian history in the second half of the 19th century. Since the 1980s, he has been researching and publishing on the history of Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav wars and the history of the Slovenes in Italy.
He has taught history of Eastern Europe at the universities of Pisa, Trieste and Padova. He is currently head of the history department at the University of Primorska in Koper. In 1995, he became a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
He has also been active in public life, including party politics. In the 1990s, he was an active member of the Slovene Union, the centrist party of the Slovene minority in the Italian region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Since 2005, he has been an active member of the Liberal Democracy of Slovenia. In 2008, he unsuccessfully ran for the Slovenian Parliament in the district of Sežana. Pirjevec is both an Italian and Slovenian citizen. Besides Slovene and Italian, he is fluent in German, English, Serbo-Croatian, Russian and French languages. He is a member of the Honorary Board of the European Association of History Educators.

Major works

In Italian
In Slovene