The Slovene Research Initiative (SRI) at The Ohio State University is excited to announce the winners of the SRI Visiting Scholar Exchange Program. SRI is a collaborative program focused on faculty exchange administered by the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (CSEEES) at Ohio State, in partnership with the Society for Slovene Studies and made possible by the generous support of the Slovene Ministry of Education and Science and the Research Center at the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC-SAZU). For the 2025 cycle, applications were also accepted from advanced graduate students, with recognition that this type of support is particularly valuable early in a scholar's career. 

The CSEEES Committee for the Slovene Research Initiative has chosen Ohio State professor Shoshanah Inwood and PhD student Siobhán Seigne as visiting scholars to Ljubljana for 2025.

Dr. Inwood is a rural sociologist and an associate professor in Ohio State’s School of Environment and Natural Resources at the Wooster campus. She holds degrees in rural sociology, environmental science and biology. Her career has focused on the intersection of agriculture, environment and society in the context of community and economic development. During her time in Slovenia, she will work with her colleague Dr. Magda Černič Istenič from the University of Ljubljana/Sociomedical Institute ZRC-SAZU to adapt the “Whole Farm Planning for the 21st Century: Integrating Childcare, Health Care, and Health Insurance into Whole Farm Planning Curriculum” for the Slovenian context and develop a long-term cross-national research and extension project. 

Siobhán Seigne is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University.  She is a previous CSEEES Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian and Bulgarian languages, and her research investigates transnational cinematic depictions of ethnic and gender violence in Eastern European countries. During her time in Slovenia, she will examine the evolution of the representation of the European Union in Slovenian filmmaker Damjan Kozole’s filmography and how this has shaped the international perception of Slovenian national identity. 

The Board of the Slovene Research Initiative in Slovenia has named Dr. Jure Tičar the 2025 Slovene Reasearch Initiative exchange fellow.

Tičar works at the Anton Melik Geographical Institute, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, which has been cooperating with the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at The Ohio State University for several years. This cooperation started as a result of the Slovene Research Initiative. Tičar is the project leader and principal investigator in Slovenia of the "Supporting Holocene Climate Reconstruction with High-Resolution Cryospheric Proxies from the Karst Ice Caves of Slovenia", a collaboration between the two institutions. During his study visit, he will further deepen and expand the existing cooperation.