The Yugoslav and Croatian ethnologist, Maja Bošković Stuli (born in 1922 in Osijek, Croatia) died Aug. 14, 2012 in Zagreb. She had received elementary and secondary education in Zagreb before beginning her studies in Slavics at Zagreb University’s School of Arts and Sciences in 1945. From 1946 to 1948, she studied in Kazan and Leningrad (former USSR), and from 1948 to 1950 in Belgrade, where she graduated. She subsequently went on to obtain her PhD in Zagreb in 1961.
From 1952 until her retirement, Maja Bošković Stulli worked at the Ethnology and Folklore Insitute of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb, as its director from 1963 through 1973, and as the editor-in-chief of the periodical publication Folk Art. In 2000, she was elected life-time member of the Literature Section of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb.
Maja Bošković Stulli is an author of numerous scholarly essays and studies, two autobiographical books: On Oral Tradition and on Life (1999) and Stories from my Homeland (2007), as well as of numerous anthologies of prose from the Croatian oral tradition. One of her most significant scholarly works is the study entitled Oral Literature Past and Present, published by The 20th Cenury Library in 1983 (our archives contain a few documents pertaining to this book).
For her internationaly acclaimed scolarship, she had received numerous awards, among them, The Herder Award (Vienna 1991, G. Pitre – S. Salomone Award (Palermo, 1992), Antun Barac Award of the Slavics Committee of the Croatian Philological Society (1999), and the Life’s Work Award of the Croatian Ethnological Society (2009).
