Curriculum Vitae:

Dejan Valentinčič is primarily employed as a lawyer at District Court of Nova Gorica and additionally employed as Head of Center for Social Science Research of American Slovenian Education Foundation ASEF and as vice-dean of Faculty of Slovenian and International Studies of New University. Between March 2020 and June 2022 he was State Secretary at the Governmental Office for Slovenians Abroad. He teaches part-time at the School of Advanced Social Studies (SASS) as an assistant professor of political science and at the European Law Faculty and School of Governmental and European Studies (SGES), both New University as an assistant professor of constitutional law and human rights.

Dejan Valentinčič, born in 1987, obtained both his LL.B degree and LL.M degree with honors from the European Faculty of Law in Nova Gorica and his Ph.D. from the School of Advanced Social Studies in Nova Gorica. His doctoral supervisor was international recognized sociologist Nikolai Genov, professor emeritus of Freie Universität Berlin and his co-supervisor was lawyer Jernej Letnar Černič. In the past, he was employed as a teaching assistant at SGES, a legal consultant at the Slovenian Environment Agency, junior researcher at SASS, a legal clerk at Court of Appeals in Koper, and as a secretary in two minister’s cabinets at Governmental Office for Slovenians Abroad. During his studies, he was stagier in the European Parliament. At that time he has spent three summers in Klagenfurt (Celovec), where he was a journalist at the Nedelja, Slovenian minority’s newspaper. Since then he has been writing for various newspapers. He is also active in many non-governmental organizations.

During the years, the main fields of his research, teaching, and writing were minority law and policies, migration law and policies, the status of Slovenians abroad and minorities in Slovenia, actual migration trends, brain circulation, and inter-ethnic integration. He is occasionally working also as an international adviser for the field of diaspora policies and minority policies. He is constantly visiting Slovenian communities all around the world. In the past years he was also lecturing and researching at Harvard University – Center for European Studies, Santa Clara University, Cleveland State University, all USA, and Pontificia Universidad Catolica Argentina in Buenos Aires. He is the author of three books, including research monograph “Resia: A valley and its people between Slovenian, Italian and its own identity”, and of many scientific articles and papers. Between 2019 and 2021 he was leading a research project “”Mitigating the consequences of brain drain and strengthening the mechanism of brain circulation”, and currently (2022 – 2024) he leads a research project “Digital transformation of the Slovenian emigrant community in the United States of America and Canada”.