Team

Igor Pilschikov

Principal Investigator

Igor Pilschikov

Principal Investigator

Igor Pilschikov is Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages & Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is founding academic editor of the Fundamental Digital Library of Russian Literature & Folklore [http://feb-web.ru] and CPCL: Information System on Comparative Poetics and Comparative Literature [https://en.cpcl.info] (with Vera Polilova), and co-editor of Studia Metrica et Poetica [https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/smp] (University of Tartu Press; with Mihhail Lotman and Maria-Kristiina Lotman) and Pushkin Review [https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/532] (Slavica Publishers; with Joe Peschio). He has published extensively in several areas, such as Russian poetry in comparative perspective, the Russian reception of Romance literatures, East/Central European literary theory, cultural semiotics, poetics, verse theory, and corpora building. In particular, he has authored two monographs on the Russian “Golden Age” poets (Batiushkov and Pushkin) and a book of interviews on philology and digital humanities.

Andrei Terian

Executive manager; Romanian team coordinator

Andrei Terian

Executive manager; Romanian team coordinator

Andrei Terian is Professor of Romanian literature and Vice Rector for Research, Innovation, and Internationalization at the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania. His specialties are 19th to 21st century Romanian literature, world literature, and cultural heritage. He has published essays in international journals such as Textual Practice, Life Writing, CLCWeb – Comparative Literature and Culture, Slovo, World Literature Studies, Primerjalna Književnost, Interlitteraria, ALEA: Estudos Neolatinos. His latest books include the coedited volumes Romanian Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Theory in the “Post” Era (Bloomsbury, 2021; AATSEEL Prize for Best Multi-Scholarly Volume). He is the also the PI of the project “Establishing a Laboratory of Cultural Heritage in Central Romania” (2023–2025).

Michał Mrugalski

Polish Team Coordinator

Michał Mrugalski

Polish Team Coordinator

After receiving his Ph.D. in Literary Studies from the University of Warsaw, he habilitated at the University of Tübingen with a venia legendi in Comparative and General Literary Studies as well as Slavic Literature and Culture; he has taught and researched at the Universities of Warsaw, Tübingen, Berlin (Humboldt), and Basel. His research interests include computational literary studies; interrelations between literature and the visual arts, theater, performance, and film; transcultural intellectual history of aesthetics; literary theory and comparative literature (with a focus on Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic, German and English speaking countries, and France); and narratology.

Andrei Dobritsyn

Russian Team Coordinator

Andrei Dobritsyn

Russian Team Coordinator

Andrei Dobritsyn taught Russian literature at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), where he defended his thesis on Franco-Russian relations in 2003. He currently teaches Russian literature at the University of Lausanne. He is the author of the book “Immortal Genre: Western European Sources of Russian Epigram from the 18th to the Early 19th Century” (Peter Lang, Bern-NY-..., 2008) and about 80 works on the history of Russian poetry, Franco-Russian literary relations and the theory of verse.

Maciej Eder

Senior Researcher

Maciej Eder

Senior Researcher

Based in Kraków, he serves as the Director of the Institute of Polish Language at the Polish Academy of Sciences and as a part-time Associate Professor at the Pedagogical University of Kraków. With a background in early modern Polish and Latin literature, he seamlessly bridges traditional scholarship and digital humanities. His research integrates computational stylistics, quantitative linguistics, and machine-learning techniques to reveal unique authorial signatures in texts despite editorial revisions. He has contributed to critical editions of seminal 16th- and 17th-century Polish works, linking historical inquiry with modern computational analysis. As the leader of several research projects, including the CLS INFRA infrastructural initiative, he champions interdisciplinary collaboration and academic inclusiveness. Moreover, he develops Stylo, a specialized R package for advanced stylometric analysis, uniting the rich legacy of the past with today’s digital scholarship.

Anastasia Belousova

Senior Researcher

Anastasia Belousova

Senior Researcher

Anastasia Belousova is Assistant Professor at the National University of Colombia. She holds degrees from Lomonosov Moscow State University, the University of Bologna, and a Ph.D. from the Russian University for the Humanities. Since 2017, she has contributed to CPCL, the Information System on Comparative Poetics and Comparative Literature. She co-edited Res Philologica (2014), a special issue of Literatura: teoría, historia, crítica (2023), and collective volumes on Romance stanzas in Russia (2020) and Dante’s reception in Colombia (2025). Her published research focuses on comparative metrics and poetics, translation studies, and the cultural interaction between semi-peripheral cultures (Russia, Italy, and Latin America).

Patrick Flack

Senior Researcher

Patrick Flack

Senior Researcher

Senior Lecturer in history of ideas of Central and Eastern Europe at the University of Fribourg since 2021. He studied Russian, philosophy and history in Geneva, Berlin and Moscow, before obtaining a PhD from Charles University in Prague (2011). He was then a SNF post-doc researcher at the Central-European Institute of Philosophy (Prague), the Peter-Szondi Institute (Berlin) and the Husserl Archives (Leuven). In 2012, he founded sdvig press, an open access digital publishing platform, which runs the international project Open Commons of Phenomenology

Erik Martin

Senior Researcher

Erik Martin

Senior Researcher

Erik Martin is a research fellow at Viadrina University in Germany, specializing in European Romanticism, Ecocriticism, and French-Polish cultural exchange. His recent publications include the edited volume "Figuren der Endlichkeit in der Europäischen Romantik" (De Gruyter, 2024) and an upcoming special issue of Welt der Slaven titled "Green Cultures in Eastern Europe."

Vera Polilova

Senior Researcher

Vera Polilova

Senior Researcher

Vera Polilova, PhD (Kandidat filologicheskikh nauk) in European Literatures and Russian Literature, Lomonosov Moscow State University, 2012. Senior Researcher at the Philological Faculty and the Institute for World Culture, Lomonosov Moscow State University. Editor of CPCL (an Information System on Comparative Poetics and Comparative Literature), co-edited with Igor Pilshchikov (https://en.cpcl.info/). She is a specialist in Spanish and Russian literatures, verse theory, and comparative poetics. Her research focuses on Russian-West-European cultural relations, comparative metrics, and translation history and theory. She has authored over 70 publications and teaches specialized courses on comparative metrics, and the interpretation of verse texts. Winner of the Moscow Award for Young Researchers (2022) and the Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2021). She is also the PI of the project “Metrical and Rhythmical Borrowings in the History and Development of Russian Verse” (2019–2024).

Ștefan Baghiu

Postdoctoral Researcher

Ștefan Baghiu

Postdoctoral Researcher

Stefan Baghiu is Lecturer of Romanian Literature and Literary Theory with the Department of Romance Studies at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu and the editorial secretary of the Transilvania journal (www.revistatransilvania.ro). He is also one of the coordinators of the Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel (1845-1947), the first digital archive of the Romanian modern novel available for research and public access. His work is mainly related to quantitative analysis of world literature, translations of novels, and the ideologies of literature. He has edited and coordinated several collective volumes, such as Ruralism and Literature in Romania (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019), Beyond the Iron Curtain: Revisiting the Literary System of Communist Romania (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2021), and Oddities and Orthodoxies in the Philosophy of State Socialism: Science, Social Engineering, Global Dialectics (Vienna: CEU Press, forthcoming). He has coordinated several issues on international and Romanian monographs of literary theory. He has published in journals like Comparative Literature Studies (USA), Central Europe (UK), Studies in East European Thought (USA), Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Nature), Primerjalna književnost (SL), World Literature Studies (SK), Transylvanian Review (RO), Metacritic Journal of Comparative Studies and Theory (RO).

Tomasz Krupa

Postdoctoral Researcher

Tomasz Krupa

Postdoctoral Researcher

Tomasz Krupa is a Research Assistant Professor in the Institute of Romance Studies at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. He is also a member of the Europes-Eurasia Research Centre (CREE) at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) in Paris, where he defended his doctoral thesis in 2022, titled "Corps et altérité dans l’œuvre littéraire de Sorana Gurian" (Body and Otherness in the Writing of Sorana Gurian). His dissertation was nominated for the INALCO Best PhD Thesis Award. Since 2021, he has been part of the editorial team of the journal Romanica Cracoviensia. He specializes in 20th-century Romanian and French-language literature, with a focus on gender studies, feminist literary criticism, and the reception of women’s writing. His research also explores transnational and sociological approaches to semiperipheral literatures, particularly Romanian and Polish, and their immediate interactions.

Vlad Pojoga

Postdoctoral Researcher

Vlad Pojoga

Postdoctoral Researcher

Vlad Pojoga is Vice-Dean for Academic Affairs and Lecturer in World Literature and Narrative Theory at the Faculty of Letters and Arts at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania. He wrote a PhD on interactive narratives and co-edited two volumes, “The Culture of Translation in Romania” and “Ruralism and Literature in Romania”, both published with Peter Lang. He has translated extensively from English into Romanian, including Fredric Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” or Sianne Ngai’s “Our Aesthetic Categories.” His research focuses mainly on the relationship between literature and the digital and the integration of Romanian literature into world literature. He is one of the editors of SCOPUS Q1 Transilvania, a highly rated Romanian literary studies journal.

Costi Rogozanu

Postdoctoral Researcher

Costi Rogozanu

Postdoctoral Researcher

Snejana Ung

Postdoctoral Researcher

Snejana Ung

Postdoctoral Researcher

Snejana Ung is Research Assistant at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. She specializes in post-Yugoslav literature, Romanian novel, and the inter-peripheral circulation of literature and criticism in South-Eastern Europe, mainly between Romania and Yugoslavia. She wrote a PhD on post-Yugoslav literature as world literature. She also contributed to the volumes Ruralism and Literature in Romania (edited by Ștefan Baghiu, Vlad Pojoga, and Maria Sass, Peter Lang, 2019), The German Model in Romanian Culture (edited by Maria Sass, Ovio Olaru, and Andrei Terian, Peter Lang, 2023), and published articles in international journals, such as Primerjalna književnost, Transilvania, and Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory.

Alex Văsieș

Postdoctoral Researcher

Alex Văsieș

Postdoctoral Researcher

Alex Văsieș is currently the editorial coordinator of Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu’s Press. He wrote a PhD thesis on the topic of maximalist novels and he has published several articles on adiacent subjects, as well as three collections of poetry. He has translated more than a dozen works of fiction (Chuck Palahniuk, Tom Hanks, Graeme Macrae Burnet, among others), literary theory (Fredric Jameson or George Lakoff and Mark Johnson) and poetry (Alice Notley).

Maria Chiorean

PhD Candidate

Maria Chiorean

PhD Candidate

Maria Chiorean is a PhD candidate and research assistant at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. She has an MLitt in Postcolonial and World Literatures from the University of St Andrews (Scotland) and a BA in comparative literature and Romanian literature from Babeș-Bolyai University (Cluj-Napoca, Romania). She is currently studying the representation of ethno-racial minorities in the modern Romanian novel. Her work has been published in journals such as Studies in the Novel, Transilvania, Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, and Transylvanian Review.

Maria David

PhD Candidate

Maria David

PhD Candidate

David Tereza Maria is a Romanian teacher (secondary school) and a Phd candidate at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. She has published a few articles in SCOPUS Q1 Transilvania. She is writing a PhD on the representation of space in the Romanian novel (1920-1940). Her research focuses mainly on structures that have a significant influence on the perception of services, business and commerce. Her thesis is a study on literary representations of establishments providing accommodation, meals, and other services. She has translated a few articles from English into Romanian, for example Martin Pitts, Miguel John Versluys, „Objectscapes” sau peisajul cu obiecte: un manifest pentru cercetarea impactului pe care îl are producția de obiecte asupra societăților din trecut, included in Studii contemporane în traducere. Istorie, antropologie, arheologie (Sibiu, Editura ULBS, 2021).

Crina Neacșu

PhD Candidate

Crina Neacșu

PhD Candidate

Crina Neacșu is a PhD Candidate in Philology and Research Assistant at the Faculty of Letters and Arts at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. Through her PhD thesis, she seeks to analyze the evolution of the representation of queer minorities in Romanian media discourse post-2000, employing the framework of critical discourse analysis. She took part in DIGIROPO – The digital analysis of Romanian poetry from its origins to 1900: Stylistic regimes, thematic patterns, geographical dispersions and is currently taking part in CORECON – The coverage and reception of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in Polish, Romanian and English-language media: A comparative critical discourse study with recommendations for journalism training. Her research interests and papers primarily focus on language studies, discourse analysis, critical race theory, gender theory, and queer theory.

Cătălina Stanislav

PhD Candidate

Cătălina Stanislav

PhD Candidate

Cătălina Stanislav is a PhD candidate at "Lucian Blaga" University of Sibiu. Her doctoral research focuses on Romanian women novelists from 1845 to 1914, analyzing their dual marginalization both as women and as writers from the European periphery. Her academic interests are situated at the intersection of Gender Studies and Literary Studies, drawing on her Master’s degree in Gender Studies from Utrecht University. In addition to her academic work, she is an experienced translator, having translated into Romanian several foundational texts in gender theory by scholars such as Sara Ahmed, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, and Judith Butler.