Galin Tihanov Principal Investigator
Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He has held visiting professorships at universities in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. He is the author of six books, including The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Stanford UP, 2019) which won the 2020 AATSEEL Prize for “best book in literary studies”. Tihanov has been elected to the British Academy (2021) and to Academia Europaea (2012). He serves on the Executive Board of the Institute for World Literature at Harvard University and as Honorary Scientific Advisor to the Institute of Foreign Literatures, CASS, Beijing; he is also Past President of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory. His current work is on world literature, cosmopolitanism, and exile.
Andrei Terian Executive Manager
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).
Marko Juvan Team Leader
Marko Juvan, a member of the Academia Europaea and the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, is Senior Researcher at the ZRC SAZU Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies, Professor of Literary Theory at the University of Ljubljana and a member of the ICLA/AILC Executive Committee. His publications on poetics, discourse theory, intertextuality, literary geography, world literature, romanticism, modernism and neo-avant-garde include the books History and Poetics of Intertextuality (Purdue University Press, 2008), Literary Studies in Reconstruction (Peter Lang, 2011), Hibridni žanri (Hybrid Genres, Ljubljana, 2017), Worlding a Peripheral Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and Zadnja sezona modernizma in maj’68 (The Last Season of Modernism and May ’68, Ljubljana, 2023) as well as edited volumes such as Writing Literary History (co-editor Darko Dolinar, P. Lang, 2006), World Literatures From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century, CLCWeb 15.5, Purdue University, 2013) and Prostori slovenske književnosti (The Spaces of Slovenian Literature, Ljubljana, 2016).
Boyko Penchev Team Leader
Boyko Penchev is Associate Professor of Bulgarian Literature at the University of Sofia. His reasearch fields include literary history, cultural studies, modernity and modernism, ideology studies. He is the author of “The Sorrows of Fin de Siecle. Studies in Literary history and Criticism” (1998), “The Bulgarian Modernism: the Modelling of the Self” (2003), “September ’23: Ideology of Memory” (2006), Contested Legacies (2017) and “Progressivists and Conservatives. Temporal Patterns in Bulgarian Literature of the Late 1940s to the 1970s” (2023), all of them in Blulgarian. Contributor to the collective volumes “History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe Vol.I, II and IV” (2004 – 2009) and “Bulgarian Literature as World Literature” (2020), all of them in English.
Teodora Dumitru Senior Researcher
Teodora Dumitru has earned her PhD from University of Bucharest and is currently a senior researcher with the G. Calinescu Institute of Literary History and Theory of the Romanian Academy. Her research focuses on the relation between metaliterary and scientific discourses (19th-20th centuries), literary epistemology, and history of modernity/ modernism/ postmodernism. She has published the monographs Sindromul evoluţionist [The Evolutionary Syndrome] (2013), Modernitatea politică și literară în gândirea lui E. Lovinescu [The Literary and Political Modernity According to Eugen Lovinescu] (2016), and Rețeaua modernităților: Paul de Man – Matei Călinescu – Antoine Compagnon [The Web of Modernities: Paul de Man – Matei Călinescu – Antoine Compagnon] (2016). She has contributed to the volumes Romanian Literature as World Literature (edited by Mircea Martin, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian, New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), Ruralism and Literature in Romania (edited by Ștefan Baghiu, Vlad Pojoga, and Maria Sass, Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019), Theory in the ‘Post’ Era (edited by Alexandru Matei, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), and The German Model in Romanian Culture (edited by Maria Sass, Ovio Olaru, and Andrei Terian, Berlin: Peter Lang, 2023).
Mihai Iovănel Senior Researcher
Mihai Iovănel holds a Ph.D. from the University of Bucharest and is a senior researcher at the G. Călinescu Institute of Literary History and Theory of the Romanian Academy. He is the author of The Improbable Jew—Mihail Sebastian: An Ideological Monograph (2012), The Detective Novel (2015), The Ideologies of Romanian Postcommunist Literature (2017), and History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 (2021). He has also written Moving Pictures. Dialogues on Criticism and Cinema (2023) with Andrei Gorzo. He is co-editor of the eight-volume General Dictionary of Romanian Literature (2016-2021). He also contributed to the volumes Romanian Literature as World Literature, edited by Mircea Martin, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Ruralism and Literature in Romania, edited by Ștefan Baghiu, Vlad Pojoga, and Maria Sass (Peter Lang, 2019), Theory in the “Post” Era. A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons, edited by Alexandru Matei, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), and Beyond the Iron Curtain: Revisiting the Literary System of Communist Romania, edited by Ștefan Baghiu, Ovio Olaru, and Andrei Terian (Peter Lang, 2021).
Aleksandar Mijatović Senior Researcher
Aleksandar Mijatović, Ph.D., is a full professor of Literary Theory and History at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka. He published chapters in edited collections by Rodopi, Palgrave, BRILL, and Routledge and scientific papers in international journals (such as Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Slavia Meridionalis, IKON: Journal of Iconographic Studies, Language Design: Journal of Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics, etc.). He authored the book Temporalities of Post-Yugoslav Literature: The Politics of Time (2020) for Rowman & Littlefield and co-authored edited collection Reconsidering (Post-)Yugoslav Time: Towards the Temporal Turn in the Critical Study of (Post)-Yugoslav Literature (2021) for BRILL. Recently he authored the book Preobrazbe književne teorije (2024).
Kamelia Spassova Senior Researcher
Kamelia Spassova is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of “Theory and History of Literature” at Sofia University, Bulgaria. In 2015 she was a research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study, Sofia. Spassova taught at the Philosophy Department of the Slavic Institute at the University of Cologne (2016-2018). Her book Event and Example in Plato and Aristotle (2012) explores the poetics of the example and her last book Modern Mimesis. Self-Reflexivity in Literature (2021) traces the transformations of the concept of mimesis in the 20th century. She is an editor of Literary Journal and the author of two books of poetry: Plot No. 17 (2007) and Kenosis – a Book of Emptiness (2016). Her poems have been translated into English, German, Russian, Romanian, Greek, Turkish, Croatian, Danish, Serbian and Italian.
Adriana Stan Senior Researcher
Adriana Stan is lecturer of Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. She authored the book The Linguistic Bastion. A Comparative History of Structuralism in Romania (2017). She also wrote studies in collective volumes published abroad (Bloomsbury, Peter Lang), co-edited a recent issue of Central Europe, and published articles in journals like Neohelicon, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Transylvanian Review. She generally works with the history of the novel, contemporary literature, ideological critique, and the history of critical ideas.
Nadezhda Stoyanova Senior Researcher
Nadezhda Stoyanova, PhD, is Associate Professor of Bulgarian literature at Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Faculty of Slavic Studies. She is an author of two books on Bulgarian literature (The Rise of Sunflowers. Bulgarian Literature of the 1920s and 1930s: Attempts on Time. Sofia: University Press St. Kliment Ohridksi, 2015 and Adornments and Grimaces. Fashion and Modernity in Bulgarian Literature of the 1920s and 1930s. Sofia: Paradigma, 2022), of articles, studies and reviews published in scholarly periodicals and collective volumes. Nadezhda Stoyanova is an Editor-in-Chief of the Philological Forum Journal. She is a coeditor of 16 collective volumes and of one literary anthology. She has been a leader of the Literature and Technology. Inventing Modernity in Bulgarian Literature Project (2016 – 2018) funded by the Bulgarian National Science Fund (Bulgarian Ministry of Education and Culture) and she is a leader of the Young Scholars: Research Experience Project (2017 – 2018; 2020 – 2024) funded by Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski.
Ștefan Baghiu Postdoc
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).
Olga Bartosiewicz-Nikolaev Postdoc
Olga Bartosiewicz-Nikolaev – PhD in Literary Studies, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Romance Philology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Associate Member of The Modern Literary Philology Research Center at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, member of the Polish Literary Translators Association, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences (2022-2023). Author of the monograph book devoted to B. Fundoianu’s / B. Fondane’s work (2018). She has many refereed publications on modernism in Romanian culture and literature, and social contexts of Romanian contemporary prose and poetry. Translator of Romanian fiction, poetry and essays, awarded in 2019 by the literary magazine “Literatura na Świecie” for her translation of Adrian Schiop’s novel Soldații. Poveste din Ferentari [Soldiers. Story from Ferentari]. She is an alumna of New Europe College in Bucharest (2014-2015). In 2021, she held a postdoctoral International Advanced Fellowship at the STAR-UBB Institute of Babeș-Bolyai University.
Ovio Olaru Postdoc
Ovio Olaru is Assistant Professor of German and Norwegian Language and Literature with the Department of Anglo-American and German Studies at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. His fields of research include German, Romanian, and Scandinavian studies, as well as Comparative Literature. His PhD thesis on the Internationalization of Scandinavian Noir addresses the global dynamics of popular culture by pursuing the global dissemination of Scandinavian crime fiction authors from a quantitative perspective. Most recently, his focus has shifted towards projects dealing with The Digital Archive of the Romanian Novel. He is also a translator of Scandinavian literature. He co-edited Beyond the Iron Curtain. Revisiting the Literary System of Communist Romania (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2021) and The German Model in Romanian Culture (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2023). Latest contributions include “Branding Germanness in Transylvania. Combined and uneven heritagisation” (Routledge, forthcoming).
Senida Poenariu Postdoc
Senida Poenariu received her PhD in 2018 from Transilvania University of Brașov. She authored the volume Reveriile Vestului. Lecturi americane în poezia optzecistă (Western Reveries. American readings on the 80s poetry, Transilvania University Press, Brașov, 2022). She is currently an editor at “Vatra” Literary Journal. She published in international journals such as Mass Communication and Society, Across Languages and Cultures and Journal of Consumer Culture. She has contributed to collective volumes like New Encounters. Literary. Cultural And Historical Studies (ed. Marius Miheț, Univerzita Komenského v Bratislave, 2023), and Narratives of the Present in Post-Totalitarian Societies (eds. Rodica Ilie, Dan Botezatu and Adrian Lăcătuș, Transilvania University Press, Brașov 2015).
Vlad Pojoga Postdoc
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.
Snejana Ung Postdoc
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.
Iuliana Blăjan PhD Candidate
In my research I focus on the evolution of the Romanian literary criticism, from a comparative perspective, especially in the representations and conceptualizations of borderline experiences such as trauma. By exploring how authors of the interwar period portrayed trauma and identity crises, I hope to contribute to a better understanding of how literature reflects and shapes human experiences, considering that literary analysis plays an essential role in understanding the profound impact of war on the individual and society.
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.
Alin Cîrtog PhD Candidate
Alin Cîrtog is a professor of Romanian language and literature at Avenor College in Bucharest. Since 2023, he is enrolled in a doctoral program with a research project entitled “Children’s Literature in Post-Communist Romania,” in which addresses topics such as: conceptual boundaries of children’s literature at the national and international levels, the evolution of children’s literature in Romania during the post-communist period, thematic diversity (taxonomies) and the hybridization of genres and literary forms for children. He is passionate about research in fields such as literary criticism, literary theory, world literature and children’s literature.
Daniel Coman PhD Candidate
Daniel Coman is an editor with Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu Press as well as an editor of Z9Magazine and a co-organizer of Z9Festival, a literary festival that helps promote young emerging writers. His doctoral thesis, titled Deviant Psychologies in the Interwar Romanian Novel, is concerned with the various psychologically deviant types present in the Romanian interwar literature. Either as a research assistant or a translator, he has been part of several research projects, such as Romanian Literary Patrimony Preservation and Valorization by using Intelligent Digital Solutions for Extracting and Systematization of Knowledge, The Digital Analysis of Romanian Poetry from its Origins to 1900: Stylistic Regimes, Thematic Models, Geographical Dispersions, and Theorizing (Sub)Peripheries: Strategies of Synchronization in Southeast European Literary and Cultural Criticism.