Anca Mandru is a historian of Eastern Europe. She graduated in 2019 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a dissertation on the culture of socialism in Romania before World War One. She worked as Teaching Fellow in Modern European History at the University of Birmingham (2019-2020), and then as postdoctoral researcher at the same institution in a Gerda Henkel project on the Great Depression (2021-2024). Her co-edited book, The Great Depression in Eastern Europe, was published in Open Access at the Central European University Press in 2025.