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).

The CSEEES Committee for the Slovene Research Initiative has chosen Ohio State faculty members Dr. Matthew Boyd and Dr. Lorraine Wallace as visiting scholars to Ljubljana for 2026.

Boyd is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. He will use his time in Slovenia to deepen his research into the confluence of anti-neoliberal youth politics in the former Yugoslavia and the popular music scene of that country and its successors. In his research he presents history, lyrics analysis, artist interviews, biographies, album art, and more to deliver a unified narrative of the shared goals of Punks and New Wavers the world over to oppose the cultural takeover of kitsch under ascendant neoliberalism.

Wallace is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Education and Anatomy in the College of Medicine. Throughout her time at Ohio State, she has advanced undergraduate and medical education through curriculum innovation, global engagement, and research mentorship. She designs and teaches research-intensive and competency-based courses, integrates artificial intelligence into biomedical education curricula, and leads European global health programs. Her proposed research collaboration with the National Institute of Public Health in Slovenia will identify the policy and primary-care mechanisms that drive Slovenia’s superior control of preventable cardiometabolic and cancer risk, and evaluate how Slovenia’s digital primary-care infrastructure improves adherence, continuity, and chronic-disease control.

The Board of the Slovene Research Initiative in Slovenia has named Nina Ošep the 2026 Slovene Research Initiative exchange fellow.

Nina Ošep is a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Primorska and a Young Researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her research examines peasant families in the Alpine mountain villages of Luče/Leutsch and Solčava/Sulzbach, part of the Habsburg Austrian crownland of Styria during the long nineteenth century. She analyzes how inheritance regimes, legal frameworks, and kinship structures shaped long-term family strategies in Alpine societies. While in Ohio, she will examine migration from the Upper Savinja Valley (present-day Slovenia) to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in relation to broader family and inheritance strategies.