biography in english
WALTHER, Ielyzaveta is a university professor born in a small town in the East of Ukraine, into a family of miners,where her father, Jurij Stefanov, besides being a miner, was a multilingual writer and translator. She graduated from the University of Luhansk with a BA in History, and from the Kyiv National University-KPI with a degree in Law. She later on conducted her MA research at the University of Wrocław, in Poland.
She currently teaches sociolinguistics of minority languages (such as Sorbian, Welsh, Kashubian etc.) at the University of Leipzig and is writing her PhD thesis on miners' literature in a minority language context.