About

Zrinka Stahuljak is a professor and director of the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies at UCLA, specializing in medieval studies, critical theory, translation studies, and medievalism. Growing up in a minor language (Croatian) within the communist regime of the former Yugoslavia, her early experiences with conflicting nationalist and universalist narratives led her to study the Middle Ages, a formative period for European discourses and vernacular languages. She earned her Ph.D. from Emory University in 2000 and has since taught at UCLA and previously at Boston University. Her scholarly work is shaped by her lifelong interest in issues of translation, representation, cultural production, and the relationship of historiography to history, with particular focus on exchange, mediation, and transmission, as well as linguistic and cultural differences and power structures. Her recent book, 'Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature,' exemplifies her integration of these themes. Her research has been supported by prestigious institutions such as the Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and she was elected to the Croatian Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.

Research topics

• Humanities
• Philosophy
• Political Science
• Linguistics
• Theology
• Chemistry
• Geography
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• From Interpreters to Fixers

  2025-10-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The focus of this chapter is on intermediary figures that we would no longer call interpreters and that I call fixers. As the chapter moves between examples in the premodern past (the Christian-Muslim and Christian-Indigenous conflictual encounters of the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries) and contemporary examples (the war in Afghanistan), the “fixer” offers a paradigmatic shift in terminology and methodology for the history of translation and contemporary translation and interpretation studies (T&IS). The analysis of medieval and contemporary fixers, who constitute a third space, not an in-between space, offers major new clues to two of the thorniest questions in T&IS: fidelity and agency.

  PublisherDOI

• 25.05.10 Grollemond, Larisa, Kelin Michael, Elizabeth Morrison, and Joshua O’Driscoll. The Book of Marvels: A Medieval Guide to the Globe.

  Indiana Magazine of History (Indiana University) · 2025-05-14

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Better Early Than Late: Early Global Studies at a Public University

  Speculum · 2024-12-16

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Fixers

  2024 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Geography
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• How Early before It Is Too Late? “Medieval” Periodization, Epistemic Change, and the Institution

  Viator · 2023-07-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This talk—delivered as a plenary address at the 99th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America—interrogates the epistemic foundations of “medieval studies” that are grounded in linearity, connectivity, and affiliation. In it, I outline a pathway away from Eurocentric periodization and epistemic categories through a model of strategic comparison with Indigenous philosophies. I also sound a hopeful note for “medieval studies” and its capacity to engage the past as the archive for alternative futurities. The talk charts one possible path toward the “early global,” in institutional and scholarly terms, as it relates to the UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies (CMRS–CEGS). By rethinking how an institution can provide new and connected methodologies and nonhegemonic epistemologies, CMRS–CEGS has developed a research platform that enables the study of early periods on a planetary scale.

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• Translation

  Liverpool University Press eBooks · 2022-05-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Penser l'anachronisme: Entre-Vue avec Zrinka Stahuljak pour la revue Entre-Temps

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2022-03-29

  preprintSenior author

  Dans cette nouvelle Entre-vue, nous recevons l'historienne du Moyen Âge Zrinka Stahuljak. En septembre 2021, elle a fait paraître, au Seuil, son dernier livre "Les fixeurs au Moyen Âge: Histoire et littérature connectées". L'utilisation de ce terme, a priori anachronique, indique la manière dont l'historienne construit son regard sur la période médiévale. Dans cet entretien avec Louise Gentil, elle revient sur son itinéraire, de chercheuse mais aussi de fixeuse, depuis la guerre en ex-Yougoslavie jusqu'à l'Université de Californie où elle enseigne aujourd'hui.

  Publisher

• Afterword Fixing Translation: Fixers as Paradigm for a Commensurate Social History of Translation

  Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies · 2021-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Social history of translation, as Claire Gilbert reminds us via George Steiner in her "Introduction" to this special issue, sees translation operating in every act of communication. It does not sever translation, and language to wit, from people who practice and wield it. In contrast, cultural history of translation has maintained our sights on textual translation and traditions, imbricated as it is in the European heritage of the philosophy of translation of the Romantic period (Herder, Schleiermacher, Benjamin, down to Berman, Derrida, Cassin, and Apter).1 The focus on textuality—relations between texts, between ideas, and between traditions—rather than on sociality—relations between people or relations between people and translational outcomes—has been especially the hallmark of research in the period traditionally defined for Europe as medieval, and less so for the early modern period whose scholarship has been interested in intermediary figures and biographies for several decades.2 The enormous promise of a social history of translation for the whole of the premodern period (by which I mean medieval and early modern, as traditionally defined in the study of Europe and the Mediterranean) is then to allow an integrated and holistic analysis of people and texts, of orality and writing, of ephemeral phenomena and material traces. This is indeed the challenge that this special issue meets with success because it advances significantly our epistemologies and methodologies of the history of translation when it reinscribes agency and contingency at the heart of communication.

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• Nouvelle Histoire du Moyen Âge

  Le Seuil eBooks · 2021-10-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Les langues du voyage. Le roman bourguignon et ses « fixeurs » méditerranéens

  Burgundica · 2021-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sarah Kay

  New York University

  14 shared

• Virginie Greene

  14 shared

• Sharon Kinoshita

  14 shared

• Peggy McCracken

  14 shared

• Caroline Palmėr

  McGill University

  9 shared

• D Brewer

  Brewer Science (United States)

  9 shared

• Virginie Greene Sarah Kay

  9 shared

• Antony Rowe

  Brewer Science (United States)

  9 shared

Awards & honors

• Guggenheim Foundation support
• Fulbright Research Scholarship
• Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton
• Croatian Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020)
• Mellon Foundation Grant, “Race in the Global Past through Na…