Jože Pirjevec (born 1 June 1940), registered at birth Giuseppe Pierazzi because of the Italianization policy under the Fascist regime, is a Slovene–Italian historian and a prominent diplomatic historian of the west Balkans region, as well as a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
He was born in a Slovene-speaking family in Sežana, Slovenia, then part of the fascist Kingdom of Italy. His younger sister, Marija, became a translator and literary scholar. After World War II, the family moved from Yugoslavia to the Free Territory of Trieste. In 1966, he received a degree in history from the University of Trieste and in 1971 graduated from the University of Pisa.[1] He continued his studies at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna. In 1977, he obtained his PhD in Ljubljana under the supervision of historian Fran Zwitter.[2] In 1983 he became an associate professor at the University of Trieste, and in 1986 a full professor of Eastern European history at the Faculty of Political Science in Padua.
He initially researched the relations between Italy and the South Slavic peoples during the Risorgimento in mid 19th century. He continued with research on Russian history in the second half of the 19th century. Since the 1980s, he has been researching and publishing on the history of Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav wars and the history of the Slovenes in Italy.
In 1988 he received the Kidrič Fund Award for his book Tito, Stalin and the West, and in 2002 he received the Premio Acqui Award for his monograph on the 1991-1999 Yugoslav Wars.
He is currently head of the history department at the University of Primorska in Koper. In 2009, he was elected a full member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
He has also been active in public life, including party politics. In the 1990s, he was an active member of the Slovene Union, the centrist party of the Slovene minority in the Italian region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Since 2005, he has been an active member of the Liberal Democracy of Slovenia. In 2008, he unsuccessfully ran for the Slovenian Parliament in the district of Sežana. Pirjevec is both an Italian and Slovenian citizen. Besides Slovene and Italian, he is fluent in German, English, Serbo-Croatian, Russian and French languages. He is a member of the Honorary Board of the European Association of History Educators.
In Italian
In Slovene