Ivan Perkov was born in Split in 1989. He completed his undergraduate studies in sociology at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Split in 2010 and obtained a Master’s degree in sociology from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, in 2013. In 2021, he defended his doctoral dissertation entitled “Social Aspects of the Waste Management System in Zagreb” under the supervision of Anka Mišetić and Ognjen Čaldarović. He was awarded a Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences scholarship for excellence in doctoral studies.
From 2014 to 2017, he was employed at the Rectorate of the University of Zagreb. Since 2017, he has worked at the Department of Sociology of the Faculty of Croatian Studies, first as a teaching and research assistant and, since 2022, as an assistant professor in the field of social sciences, discipline of sociology, with a specialisation in specialised sociologies. His main research and professional interests include urban sociology, the sociology of risk, political sociology, and social ecology.
He is the course coordinator for several courses at the Department of Sociology. These include “Risk Society”, which he launched in cooperation with the distinguished Dutch sociologist Joost van Loon, and “The Holocaust”, developed in cooperation with Professor Renato Matić. Since 2026, he has also taught the course “Culture Wars: Challenges for Contemporary Sociology” as part of the Advanced Sociological Theories module (Fortgeschrittene Soziologische Theorien) at the Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt in Germany.
For more than a decade, he was involved in academic journalism as an editor of Universitas, the Croatian university newspaper. He also participated in launching studentski.hr, Croatia’s first student portal. He regularly publishes popular science and analytical articles in daily and weekly newspapers and appears in radio and television programmes. In 2023, he received the Young Scientists and Artists Award presented by the Association of University Teachers and Other Scholars in Zagreb.
From 2022 to 2024, he served as Vice-Dean for Business Operations at the Faculty of Croatian Studies. He is active in several professional associations and is a member of the Croatian Bioethics Society, the Croatian Philosophical Society, the American Sociological Association, and the European Sociological Association. He is also an active member of Matica hrvatska, one of Croatia’s central cultural and identity institutions, where he serves as Secretary of the Department of Sociology.
He has published numerous articles in academic journals and international conference proceedings and has presented papers at more than 25 international scientific conferences and symposia. He is the author of the book Društvo otpada (Waste Society, 2022).