Sabine Rutar, PhD

Senior Researcher / Editor-in-Chief Comparative Southeast European Studies at Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg, Germany

Sabine Rutar is Senior Researcher in History at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg, Germany. She is Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor of the multidisciplinary journal Comparative Southeast European Studies (De Gruyter Brill). In 2022-2023 she was interim professor of global history at Potsdam University. Before joining the IOS in 2008, she worked at the Institute for Social Movements at the Ruhr University Bochum and at the Georg-Eckert-Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig. In 2007-2008, she was Feodor-Lynen-Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation at the Univerza na Primorskem in Koper. She held guest professorships and fellowships, among others, at the Znanstveno-raziskovalno središče (ZRS) in Koper, the EHESS Paris, the University of Ljubljana, the Humboldt University of Berlin, the Imre Kertesz Kolleg in Jena, the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, and the Berlin Center for Cold War Studies. She obtained her PhD in 2001 at the European University Institute in Florence, with a study on the formation of the social democratic milieu in late Habsburg Trieste. Her research interests include the labour, economic, social, and environmental history of mining and maritime industries, the history of social movements and resistance at the workplace; the history of occupied societies during the Second World War, the Cold War, and the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s; and the history of borderlands. Her geographic focus of  research is the (northeastern) Adriatic region; Yugoslavia, Slovenia, Italy, Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Statement of interest:

During my stay, I look forward to get in touch with members and other fellows of the institute working on topics such as labour history, mining and maritime industries, borders, the Second World War, the Cold-War, in Yugoslavia and elsewhere.

For my current research, I explore the history of energy supplies in the post-World-War-II borderlands between Italy and Yugoslavia. Specifically, I want to find out more about the “coal connection” that continued to exist between Istria and northern Italy inspite of the territorial and ideological changes and conflicts. I plan to consult sources from the State Archives in Ljubljana in order to do so.

More generally, I am interested in strengthening the cooperation with the INZ both in the field of the history of the German and Italian World-War-II occupation of Slovenia and Yugoslavia – and its consequences –, and in the field of the environmental history of socialist Yugoslavia. In the latter framework, I want to entangle the history of salt harvesting and coal mining in Istria further. A future cooperation with the INZ would be an asset in this.

Selected Publications:

• Kultur – Nation – Milieu. Sozialdemokratie in Triest vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg, Essen: Klartext, 2004 (Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen, 23).
• “Mining as Maritime History? The Coalmine in Sečovlje from Fascist Beginnings to the Early Cold War.” Acta Histriae 34 (2), 2026 (forthcoming).
• “Food and Labour in Yugoslav Mining Industries, 1941-1945.” In: Food, Scarcity and Power in Southeastern Europe during the Second World War. Edited by Paolo Fonzi, Sabine Rutar, and Xavier Bougarel. London: Bloomsbury, 2024, 37-54.
• “Resistance and Regulation on the Self-Managed Shop Floor in Yugoslavia.” in: Power at Work. Control and Resistance in Heteronomous Labour Relations. Edited by Nicole Mayer-Ahuja and Marcel van der Linden.  London: Bloomsbury, 2023, 187-210.
• “Property as Metaphor: Home and Belonging in Goran Vojnović’s Film ‘Piran – Pirano’ (Slovenia, 2010).” In: No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe. Vanishing Others. Edited by Anna Wylegała, Sabine Rutar and Małgorzata Łukianow. Cham: Palgrave, 2023, 305-329.