Sofiya Zahova appointed director of Vigdís International Centre

Sofiya Zahova has been appointed director of Vigdís International Centre for Multilingualism and Intercultural Understanding at the University of Iceland. The centre operates under the auspices of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, and is affiliated to the Vigdís Finnbogadóttir Institute for Foreign Languages at the University of Iceland.

Sofiya holds PhD in Ethnology from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (PhD thesis “Dynamic of identity: Montenegro after Yugoslavia”), and her interdisciplinary research has been focused on the interrelation between identity politics, writing, knowledge production, minority issues and community identity from historical and contemporary perspectives.

As a researcher at the University of Iceland, she has been the PI of the projects RomIs: History and Ethnography of Roma in Iceland (supported by RANNÍS, 2022-2025) and Roma in the Centre (NOS-HS/Nordic Research Council, 2019-2022). Previously, Sofiya was director of Vigdísarstofnun (June 2022-Sept 2023), a research fellow for the ERC RomaInterbellum project at the University of St Andrew in Scotland (2018-2021), a postdoctoral researcher at the Vigdís Finnbogadóttir Institute of Foreign Languages (2016-2019) and assistant professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies at Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (2011-2016).

As an expert in minority languages and minority issues, Sofiya has worked with the Council of Europe (CoE), United Nations (UN), UNICEF, and the OSCE, and currently serves as Iceland’s representative on the Steering Committee for the International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022-2032. She has published articles in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters and authored or co-edited several books, most recently The Romani literature (Paradigma, 2024, in Bulgarian), Roma Writing. Romani literature and press in Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe from 19th century until the Second World War (Brill, 2021, in English), Sunnudagsmatur og fleiri sögur Rómafólks (Stofnun Vigdísar Finnbogadóttur í erlendum tungumálum og Háskólaútgáfan, 2020).