Dubravka Zima is a full professor at the Faculty of Croatian Studies, University of Zagreb. Her research interests include children’s and adolescent literature, literary and cultural history, and childhood, youth and girlhood studies.
In the project, she contributes to the selection of literary and visual material, the development of transmedia approaches, and the analysis of reading imagination, emotional identification and student reception.
International activities
International research is an important part of her work. In February 2026, she participated in the international conference “Fairy Tales in Slavic Countries: Reception, Production, Circulation” at Sapienza University of Rome, where she presented a paper on the construction of Slavic identity in the fairy tales of Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić.
Her international activities also include collaboration with the Institut für Jugendliteratur in Vienna, an institution dedicated to research into children’s and young adult literature and to reading promotion.
This collaboration supports the exchange of knowledge and experience and connects the IUČIP project with the European research and professional community.
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Professor Dubravka Zima is a full professor at the Faculty of Croatian Studies, University of Zagreb. Her research and teaching cover Croatian and world children’s and adolescent literature, literary and cultural history, childhood, youth and girlhood studies, and popular culture. She is particularly interested in relationships between literature and cultural conceptions of the child, as well as the ways young readers encounter, understand and interpret literary texts.
She graduated in Croatian language and literature from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, in 1995. She earned her master’s degree there in 1999 with a thesis on Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić and completed her doctorate in 2004 with a dissertation on the Croatian children’s novel. From 1995 to 2009, she worked at the Faculty’s Institute for Literary Studies on the project Encyclopaedia of Croatian Literature. She has worked at the Faculty of Croatian Studies since 2009 and was appointed full professor in 2024. She teaches courses in Croatian children’s and adult literature, literary theory, literary history and popular culture.
She is the author of the books Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić (2001), Kraći ljudi: povijest dječjeg lika u hrvatskom dječjem romanu [Shorter People: A History of the Child Character in the Croatian Children’s Novel] (2011), Praksa svijeta: biografija Ivane Brlić-Mažuranić [The Practice of the World: A Biography of Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić] (2019), Djevojka u gradu: djevojaštvo u 19. stoljeću [A Girl in the City: Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century] (2022) and Hodanje: poglavlja iz kulturne povijesti [Walking: Chapters in Cultural History] (2025). Together with Marijana Hameršak, she co-authored Uvod u dječju književnost [Introduction to Children’s Literature] (2015).
She has also published dozens of scholarly and professional papers in Croatia and abroad, as well as articles devoted to the popularisation of science. She has edited and co-edited publications on children’s literature, including the collection Veliki vidar: stoljeće Grigora Viteza [The Great Healer: A Century of Grigor Vitez] and the scholarly monograph Biblioteka Vjeverica i urednički rad Grigora Viteza u dječjem nakladništvu [The Vjeverica Library and Grigor Vitez’s Editorial Work in Children’s Publishing].
Within IUČIP, she contributes to the selection of literary and visual material, the development of transmedia approaches and the analysis of student reception. Her contribution is particularly focused on reading imagination, emotional identification and the ways students connect literary texts with images, film and other media. She brings to the project a perspective that connects the theory and history of children’s literature, media culture and contemporary approaches to reading and literature teaching.
International collaboration is also an important part of her academic work. She undertook professional development at the University of Vienna in 1999 and 2003 as a scholarship holder of the Austrian Agency for Education and Internationalisation (OeAD). In the 2015/2016 and 2017/2018 academic years, she was a visiting professor at the University of Toronto, where she taught three courses in Croatian literature and culture.
In February 2026, she participated in the international conference “Fairy Tales in Slavic Countries: Reception, Production, Circulation” at Sapienza University of Rome, where she presented a paper on the construction of Slavic identity in the fairy tales of Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić. Her presentation contributed to the conference’s broader aim of opening an international dialogue on Slavic fairy tales beyond narrow folkloristic and national frameworks. Discussions focused particularly on the ways fairy tales are transmitted, adapted, reinterpreted and used to shape cultural and identity-related conceptions.
Conference website: https://talesrome2026.wordpress.com/
Her international research activities also include collaboration with the Institut für Jugendliteratur in Vienna, focused on exchanging knowledge and experience concerning contemporary approaches to reading promotion, the selection of literary material, and connections between research and educational and cultural practice.
Institut für Jugendliteratur: https://www.jugendliteratur.at/
Alongside her research and teaching, Dubravka Zima is active professionally in the field of children’s literature. She is a member of the Croatian Association of Researchers in Children’s Literature and has served on the editorial boards of the scholarly journals Libri & Liberi and Kroatologija, acting as editor-in-chief of Kroatologija from 2012 to 2017. From 2017 to 2021, she chaired the Children’s Book Professional Council at the Ministry of Culture and Media.
Project publications
Two articles in English have been written and submitted for publication:
“Flâneurs or Street Smarts? Children and The City in Croatian 20th Century Children’s Literature”
Peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in Annales, Series Historia et Sociologia, Koper, Slovenia.
“Vitalism and Antimodernism: Poetics and Politics in the Oeuvre of Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić”
Submitted to and accepted for peer review by Central European Cultures, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.
