Academy Members

Štrkalj Despot Kristina

Academic titles:

• Doctor of Science

Institutions:

• Senior Research Fellow /Tenured Scientific Advisor – Institute for the Croatian Language

Membership in the Academy:

• associate member – Department of Philological Sciences (5/16/2024 – …)

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Curriculum Vitae

Kristina Štrkalj Despot (born in 1978) graduated in 2002 and obtained her Ph.D. in 2007 from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb, ranking within the top 10% of students. Since 2003, she has been working at the Institute for the Croatian Language. She was appointed as a scientific collaborator in 2007, a senior scientific collaborator in 2011, a scientific advisor in 2017, and a tenured scientific advisor in 2022.

She has collaborated on around ten domestic and international projects and has been the leader of several projects: “Repository of Croatian Language Metaphors” (Croatian Science Foundation, 2014-2017), “Semantic Role Labeling in Slovenian and Croatian” (bilateral project, 2016-2018), and “Metaphor and Metonymy in Language and Thought” (from 2024, NextGeneration EU).

Important international collaborations include participation in the American project “MetaNet: A Multilingual Metaphor Repository” (International Computer Science Institute, University of California, Berkeley, 2013-2017). From 2013 to 2017, she was a member of the Management Committee of the COST action “European Network of e-Lexicography.” Since 2022, she has been a member of the Management Committee of the COST action “European network for Web-centred linguistic data science,” and since 2023, a member of the Management Committee of the COST action “Universality, diversity and idiosyncrasy in language technologies” (for both actions, she was also one of the proposers).

She is a member of the editorial board of two domestic linguistic journals: “Rasprave of the Institute for the Croatian Language ” (a1, Q2) and “Croatica et Slavica Iadertina” (a1), as well as two foreign journals (“Frontiers in Communication: Language Communication” and “Discourse”).

She received a Fulbright Foundation scholarship (2011-2012), an Open Society Fellowship – Oxford, and three national science awards: the Croatian State Science Award (2010), the Croatian Writers’ Association Judita Award (2010), and the Ivan Filipović State Award (2014).

She has been a visiting researcher at the following scientific institutions: University of Bologna, Italy (2023); MIT, USA (2019); University of California, Berkeley, USA (2019); UC Dublin, Ireland (2017); Metaphor Lab, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands (2016); University of California, Berkeley, USA (2015); Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Germany (2015); University of California, Berkeley, USA (2011-2012); Oxford University, UK (2009); University of Ljubljana, Slovenia (2001-2002).

She has delivered several invited lectures at American universities (CogNetwork, University of California, Berkeley; Medieval Studies Program and Linguistics Department at Cornell University; Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California, Berkeley), in Europe (Metaphor Lab Amsterdam, Netherlands; University of Southern Denmark, Denmark; University of Mannheim, Germany).

She is a member of the board of EURALEX and a permanent member of the scientific committees of international conferences: RaAM (Researching and Applying Metaphor), EURALEX, and e-Lex. She is also a member of the management boards and proposer of several COST actions.

She has participated in more than 70 international and domestic scientific conferences with regular and plenary presentations and has been involved in organizing committees of international and domestic conferences.

She is the author (or co-author) of five scientific books, editor of a book published by the John Benjamins Publishing Company, and author (or co-author) of about fifty scientific papers in domestic and (highly ranked) foreign journals, mainly in the first and second quartiles in Scopus, as well as about ten professional papers and four online resources.

In addition to her linguistic work, she has distinguished herself in literary work by publishing two novels (“Težina,” Zagreb: Profil, 2003, and “Odjel babinjače,” Zagreb: Profil, 2007) and literary criticism.

Her scientific work is characterized by a diversity of interests and methods, as well as constant activity and high productivity. From her published books and papers, three main research directions can be distinguished in which she has achieved notable results: cognitive linguistics with an emphasis on figurative language; national philology, especially the publication of critical editions and linguistic analyses of texts from the Middle Ages to the modern era; and language resources and technologies, especially e-lexicography.

In the field of national philology, Kristina Štrkalj Despot has distinguished herself with seminal editions and significant contributions to the study of the history of the Croatian language and identity, as well as ten years of work on the Old Croatian Dictionary project. Particularly noteworthy are: the critical edition of Bernardin’s lectionary from 1495, published in 2020 with Vuk-Tadija Barbarić, the monograph “Osorsko-hvarska pjesmarica,” published independently in 2016, and the seminal edition “Hrvatsko srednjovjekovno pjesništvo. Pjesme, plačevi i prikazanja na starohrvatskom jeziku,” published in 2010 with Dragica Malić and Amir Kapetanović. In a large number of studies in national philology, she deals with Croatian language-historical topics (noteworthy are discussions on the participle, syntax of complex sentences, relative clause, and instrumental case from a diachronic perspective, as well as linguistic analyses and transcriptions of a series of valuable sources of Croatian linguistic history). Particularly important is her contribution to the recently presented discovery of the previously unknown vernacular manuscript from Kotor, a Kotor transcript of Kašić’s lectionary from 1699, which testifies to the Catholic tradition of that region.

In theoretical and applied cognitive linguistic research published in internationally relevant journals, she uses corpus and experimental methods, as well as qualitative and discourse analyses. In this area, she has distinguished herself by leading the national competitive HRZZ project “Repository of Croatian Language Metaphors,” which resulted in a database of Croatian semantic frames, cognitive primitives, and image schemas, as well as conceptual metaphors with linguistic examples, one of the results of which is the edited book (ed. M. Bolognesi, M. Brdar, and K. Š. Despot. 2019. “Metaphor and Metonymy in the Digital Age. Theory and Methods for Building Repositories of Figurative Language.” John Benjamins Publishing Company. Amsterdam). A large number of works in this research direction have been published in the most important journals in this field (Q1 category) such as Metaphor and Symbol and Metaphor and the Social World.

In the field of e-lexicography, besides the aforementioned database, she has also distinguished herself by involvement in relevant COST actions, theoretical work on e-lexicography (published with German lexicographer Christine Moehrs, which laid the foundations for this discipline in Croatia, collaboration on the creation of several important semantic online resources and corpora for the Croatian language, and involvement in the most important international professional bodies in this field (member of the board of EURALEX).

Kristina Štrkalj Despot is (co)author of some of the most important semantic online resources for the Croatian language, such as MetaNet.HR – Repository of Croatian Language Metaphors; SRL tags in hr500k Corpus; Semantic hypergraph corpus SemCRO 1.0 as well as general linguistic resources such as the online edition of the Croatian Orthography and the corpus Croatian Language Treasury in SketchEngine.

Kristina Štrkalj Despot – personal page

Kristina Štrkalj Despot – CroRIS

Kristina Štrkalj Despot – Google Scholar

Kristina Štrkalj Despot -ORCID

Kristina Štrkalj Despot – SCOPUS