In particular, she has researched the Jesuit missions in Portuguese India, their efforts to translate religious texts into local languages and the resultant linguistic and social transformations of the Indians.
[2] She is based in Paris, but she has lived successively in Zagreb, Mumbai, Berkeley, Dakar, London, Pondicherry, Berlin, Bochum and currently resides in New Delhi.
Županov has suggested that Portuguese missionaries felt that there was an intrinsic geographical character to India that resisted evangelism and led to paganism.
Among his efforts was the attempt to remove the stigmatic name Parangi given by the Tamilians to the Europeans and their converts, a word that originated from farangi (meaning "foreign") but also given to low-caste people for their habit of drinking alcohol.
[9] By 1717, however, the Protestant evangelist and linguist Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg was to claim Tamil was peculiar, in the sense of distinctive, because its grammatical conjugation and declension was regular, and in terms of vocabulary, on par with Latin.