Dr. Jan Zofka

Jan Zofka studied history, East European studies and political sciences 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 for a dissertation on post-Soviet separatist movements in Transnistria and Crimea. He has worked as a researcher at Leipzig University from 2010 to 2014 and again from 2017 to 2019 in a project on East-South relations. On the topic of technology transfers between Eastern Europe and China during the Cold war he researched from 2019 until 2022. He has been invited for fellowships at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Sofia in 2016, the German Historical Institute in Moscow in 2010 and 2017 and the Imre Kertész Kolleg of the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena in 2023.  

Since March 2025 Jan Zofka has been a researcher at the GWZO and works on the topic of 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 

• Gutachtertätigkeit für Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF, Österreich); Canadian Slavonic Papers; REGION. Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia (Südkorea); Zeitschrift für Diskursforschung; International Journal of Conflict and Violence; Problems of Post-Communism.
• Mitglied des Rezensionsteams von Comparativ und Connections

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