Our professor has been promoted to the academic degree of Doctor of Science in the scientific field of humanities and philology.
Lecturer at VERN' University, Dr. Irena Medvešek, successfully defended her doctoral dissertation on the topic "Discourse in Zagreb Tourist Guides from 1882 to 1936."
She defended her dissertation at the Postgraduate Doctoral Study Program in Linguistics , at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb.
Professor Medvešek has thus been promoted to the academic degree of Doctor of Science in the scientific field of humanities and philology.
Congratulations to Dr. sc. Irena Medvešek!
SUMMARY OF THE DISSERTATION
As a commercially distributed entity intended for a short stay in a destination and in situ use (Peel and Sørensen 2016: 29), a tourist guide generally consists of three parts that define its structure: information about the country, practical information, and a description of the destination (Müller, 2012: 27). This particular text type has been neglected in traditional humanities and social sciences and considered unworthy of scientific attention. In the last few decades, this has changed, and guides have become increasingly interesting to scholars from different fields. This doctoral thesis analyzes old tourist guides to the city of Zagreb that were printed during the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Serbs/Frescoes/Yugoslavia. The corpus consists of 48 tourist guides to Zagreb or guides with a broader geographical scope that include Zagreb. By listing, describing, and systematizing the locations and events represented in the available material, a general narrative metalexicon of tourist guides to the city of Zagreb in the observed periods was established. Qualitative content analysis compared the narrative construction of space and events and the construction of national identity with the aim of identifying differences with respect to fundamental changes in state-historical circumstances, and demonstrated the adaptability and thus the information of the text type of the tourist guide about the attitudes and perceptions of their authors. Given that old guides to Zagreb, as mentioned, have not been systematically researched so far, this work is a valuable contribution to the factography related to Zagreb, not only about the periods in which they were written, but also about some historical facts. Information available in the guides about some localities, events, people and institutions has been gathered in one place. The obtained data were then compared in order to demonstrate the information of the tourist guide about the attitudes of the authors, the differences in the construction of national identity in the two observed periods on the one hand, and among domestic and foreign authors on the other, from which general conclusions were drawn that are useful and relevant today.
