Zrinka Stahuljak’s book ‘Fixers’ honored as one of year’s best by History Today
![Portrait of Zrinka Stahuljak and cover of her book "Fixers"](https://humanities.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Zrinka-Stahuljak-and-Fixers-book-cover-1024x685.jpg)
Courtesy of Zrinka Stahuljak; Courtesy of University of Chicago Press
Zrinka Stahuljak says the recognition for her new book is gratifying in part because it spotlights the underappreciated work of fixers, past and present.
January 29, 2025
|In her latest book, Zrinka Stahuljak focuses on the long-underappreciated role of “fixers” — translators and interpreters — as mediators of culture in medieval Europe.
Though “Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature” might be appropriately categorized as a work of literary history, it has now been recognized among the best of 2024 in the broader genre of history books overall by History Today, the London-based monthly.
The best-of list was chosen by a panel of 25 European and American historians. Praising Stahuljak’s work in History Today, Mirela Ivanova of the University of Sheffield wrote that the book “asks us to rethink medieval translators and all the social and political roles they served beyond simply rendering meaning from one language to another.”
Stahuljak, a professor of comparative literature and of European languages and transcultural studies, is the director of the UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies. She conducted some of the research that led to “Fixers” as part of her Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016.
The acknowledgment for her new book was gratifying in part, she said, because “historians are recognizing the work of a literary historian as historical work.” In addition, she appreciated the additional exposure the recognition brings to the unheralded fixers of the past and present. Stahuljak herself worked as a wartime interpreter during the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia.
“What is beautiful is that fixers are out in the world and they are getting quite a bit of attention,” Stahuljak said. “That feels very special for these figures who are essential figures in the shadows, made invisible, silenced and ignored.”
Listen to Stahuljak speak about the book in a New Books Network podcast, read the London Review of Books review of “Fixers,” and explore History Today’s full Books of the Year list, part 1 and part 2.