Katja Sturm-Schnabl

In 1993, Sturm-Schnabl habilitated with her dissertation on the correspondence between Franz Miklosich and the southern Slavs (Korespondenca Frana Miklošiča z Južnimi Slovani), for which she received the Leopold Kunschak Prize. Her main research areas are Slovenian literary and cultural history, South Slavic interrelationships, European transcultural studies, with a particular focus on the relationships with the French cultural area, and specific Carinthian Slovene aspects of language development. As a participant in many international conferences, she has widely published in numerous languages (including Slovenian, French, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, German, and Japanese), ​​and she promotes intercultural dialogue through the translation of selected key works from literature and research.

From 1984 to 2016, she taught South Slavic literary and cultural history at the Institute for Slavic Studies at the University of Vienna and was a member of numerous committees and the Equal Opportunities Commission. During this time, she was particularly concerned with supporting students, for whom she organized numerous university and non-university colloquia and presentation opportunities. In particular, their efforts were aimed at establishing a scientifically and historically appropriate institutional setting for Slovene studies (creation of a chair for Slovene studies, with corresponding positions for assistants), which has not yet been established.

After her release from the Eichstätt camp in central Franconia, Sturm-Schnabl attended elementary school and high school in Klagenfurt, and she studied Slavic studies, South Slavic literatures, Russian, art history, and Byzantine studies. In 1973 she received her doctorate with a study on the Slovenian dialect in the Klagenfurt Basin. From 1973 to 1984 she was a research associate at the Commission for Byzantine Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her focus was the creation of the prosopographical encyclopedia of the Palaiologian period together with her son Bojan-Ilija Schnabl.

Katja Sturm-Schnabl was born into a politically active Slovenian family on a farm in Carinthia, Austria, northeast of Klagenfurt. Her first decisive life experience was the family's deportation in April 1942. Sturm-Schnabl described it this way, "They stormed into the house, shouted incomprehensible things in abrupt sentences (when I was a child I didn't understand German) and there was immediately indescribable chaos in the house... Nemci (Germans) to the left and right and us in the middle, that is how we were taken away, we had to walk through the village." Three and a half years of imprisonment in two camps followed, during which time her ailing older sister Veronika died after receiving an injection by a camp doctor.

Katja (Stanislawa Katharina) Sturm-Schnabl (born 17 February 1936 in Zinsdorf, municipality of Magdalensberg) is a Carinthian-Slovene linguist and literary historian known for her research and contemporary eyewitness accounts of the 20th century in central Europe.