Tone Smolej graduated from the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana in 1997 with a degree in Comparative Literature and French, including a year on a Herder scholarship at the University of Vienna. He received the Prešeren Award from the Faculty of Arts for his bachelor’s thesis Zola in Cankar (Zola and Cankar). In 2003, he completed his PhD on the Slovenian reception of French naturalistic fiction. Since 1998, Smolej has worked at the Department of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the Faculty of Arts, where he was appointed full professor in 2014. He served as head of the department from 2018 to 2024. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Bielsko-Biała, the University of Graz, Charles University in Prague, Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, and Comenius University in Bratislava. He also led the ARIS-funded project The History of Doctoral Dissertations by Slovene Candidates in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1872–1918). In recognition of his efforts to popularise the life and work of early Slovenian scientists, he was awarded the Prometheus of Science Award for Excellence in Communication by the Slovenian Science Foundation in 2021. Between 2016 and 2018, he was president of the jury for the Kresnik Award. His research interests include Slovenian-French literary relations, imagology, thematology and the history of comparative literature.
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