Jelka Kernev Štrajn is a literary theorist, critic and translator. As a theorist, she devotes herself to the theory of tropes, feminist literary theory, animalism and ecocriticism. She is an author of studies from these fields, published in Primerjalna književnost, Delta, Literatura and monographic publications. Methodology wise, she leans mostly on approaches, as developed by modern semiotics, as well as the philosophical texts of Deleuze and Guattari and their theoretical heritage.
As a literary critic, she has spent several years keeping track of the modern Slovene literary production, especially poetry, in the literary supplement of the Delo newspaper.
She has taken part in many international symposiums and has even co-organized some of them. She is the co-editor of some of the thematic editions of the Primerjalna književnost journal and the co-editor and co-author of a monograph on ecocriticism – Ecology Through Poetry -, which was published in 2012 by the Indian Kolkata-based publisher Sampark. In 2009, her monograph titled Renesansa alegorije (Renaissance of Allegory) was published by ZRC SAZU.
Currently, she is intensively studying the problem of animal representation in literature.
