Dr. Jan Zofka

Jan Zofka studied history, East European studies and political science at Leipzig University from 1997 to 2005 and spent a semester at the historical faculty of St. Petersburg State University (2002). He received his PhD from Leipzig University in 2013 with a dissertation on post-Soviet separatist movements in Transnistria and Crimea. From 2010 to 2014 and again from 2017 to 2019, he worked as a researcher at Leipzig University on a project on East-South relations. From 2019 to 2022, he carried out research on the topic of technology transfers between Eastern Europe and China during the Cold war. He has held fellowships at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Sofia (2016), the German Historical Institute in Moscow (2010 and 2017) and the Imre Kertész Kolleg of the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena (2023). In 2024, he was a visiting scholar at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF). 

Since March 2025, Jan Zofka has been a researcher at the GWZO. He is working on a commodity history of cotton in the Eastern bloc.

• Transnational economic and social history of socialist Eastern Europe
• Industrialization and technology transfers in state socialism
• Commodity history in Eastern Europe
• East-South relations in the Cold War
• Internal conflict, nationalism and transformation after 1989

• PhD dissertation award of the German Society for East European Studies (Deutschen Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde - Klaus-Mehnert-Preis), 2013  
• PhD dissertation award of the Graduate Centre Humanities of the Research Academy Leipzig, 2013 

Jan Zofka has been teaching courses at Leipzig University in history, Global studies, European studies and Slavic studies.