Istvanova, Maria holds a Ph.D. from the Department of East Asian Studies at Comenius University Bratislava. She is currently a research fellow of the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Slovak Academy of Sciences and an assistant professor in the Department of Chinese Studies at the Masaryk University in Brno.

Her research interests include Chinese as a second language research, corpus linguistics with a particular focus on Chinese learner corpora, and analysis of learner’s erroneous pronunciation in Chinese.

Among her numerous publications are Characteristics of Mo Yan’s Language Reflected in Translations:Wain Examples and On the Use of Corpora in Second Language Acquisition: Chinese as an Example.

Her current project is “Image of the Belt and Road Initiative in Slovak Media (2024-2026)”.