Daša Ličen (1990) holds a bachelor's degree in Cultural Studies and Anthropology from the University of Primorska (2013). She continued her studies in Cultural Differences and Transnational Processes – CREOLE at the Department for Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Ljubljana (2013/2014), and at the Institute for Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Vienna (2014/2015). She graduated in 2015 under the supervision of prof. Bojan Baskar (Ljubljana) and prof. Maria Dabringer (Vienna) with the thesis Istrian Culinary Experts: Discourses, Taste, and Market.

In 2015, she became a researcher at the Institute of Slovenian Ethnology (Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts). She successfully defended her PhD in 2021 at the University of Ljubljana under the supervision of prof. dr. Božidar Jezernik and prof. dr. Jurij Fikfak. Her doctoral dissertation was titled Cultural Associations in Trieste as the Setting of the Identification Processes of the Triestine Population (1848-1914). She considered cultural associations to be a window revealing major social changes occurring in the 19th century Trieste. Most of all, she was interested in the bourgeois practices in this, by all accounts nationally divided city, and the dynamics between them. She was the recipient of the Faculty of Arts' (University of Ljubljana) award for the best doctoral dissertation in the humanities and social sciences for 2020/2021.

She was granted numerous grants and academic awards. In 2011, she received the University of Primorska's grant for talented students, several Erasmus grants (study exchange at the University of Antwerp, 2012; study exchange at the University of Vienna, 2014-2015; guest researcher at the University of Oslo, 2016). In 2016, the American Folklore Society awarded Daša Ličen the Sue Samuelson Award's honorable mention, and also the grant for the international scholars attending the yearly AFS conference in Florida. In 2017, she also obtained the French Government's Grant (guest researcher at INALCO Paris, 2017), the Austrian Government's Grant (guest researcher at the Department of Economic and Social History, University of Vienna, 2018) and the Fulbright scholarship for doctoral students. In 2018, Daša was awarded the Bojan Erhartič Grant – awarded by RC SASA (visiting doctoral student at EUI Florence, 2018), in 2019 the Ernst Mach Grant (visiting researcher at the University of Graz, 2020), in 2023 she was a visiting fellow at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg.

In 2022, she obtained a postdoctoral project (financed by the Slovenian Research Agency) entitled For Beasts, Against Savages: Towards the Long History of the Animal Rights Movement. Her goal is to examine the rise of the animal rights movement as a means of class distinction. In order to explain the contemporary relationship between man and animals, she traces it back to the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Since 2019, she is co-editing the Bulletin of the Slovene Ethnological Society (Glasnik Slovenskega etnološkega društva) and leading the Historical Association of Slovenia's Cultural Heritage Section.

Daša Ličen is also an assistant professor at the University of Maribor. She teachers several courses in anthropology, ethnology and history.

Research interests: historical anthropology, shaping of different identities (national, ethnic, regional), voluntary associations, anthropology of food.

Geographical focus: Central Europe, Istria, Trieste.