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TRANSHIROL

A Transnational History of Romanian Literature

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Team
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Home
About
Team
Events
Results

Project Team

Andrei Terian

Principal Investigator

Andrei Terian

Principal Investigator

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-21st centuries 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). E-mail: andrei.terian@ulbsibiu.ro

Email:andrei.terian@ulbsibiu.ro

Christian Moraru

Key Expert (Project Advisor)

Christian Moraru

Key Expert (Project Advisor)

Christian MORARU is Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at University of North Carolina, Greensboro. His recent monographs are "Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary" (2011), "Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology" (2015), and "Flat Aesthetics: Twenty-First-Century American Fiction and the Making of the Contemporary" (2023). He is also the coeditor of several essay collections including "The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory" (2022) and the in-progress "Oxford Handbook of Postmodernism".

Email:c_moraru@uncg.edu

Sorin Radu

Historical Consultant

Sorin Radu

Historical Consultant

Sorin RADU is Professor of history at the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, convenor for Romania of the International Commission for the History of Representatives and Parliamentary Institutions (since 2013) and editor-in-chief of the journal “Studia Universitatis Cibiniensis. Series Historica” (since 2008). Author and coordinator of several volumes on the history of Romania in the 20th century: “The Romanian Electorate in the Years of Parliamentary Democracy (1919-1937)”, 2004 (in Romanian); “Ion Flueraş (1882-1953). Social Democracy and Syndicalism”, 2007 (in Romanian); “The Countryside and Communism in Eastern Europe: Perceptions, Attitudes, Propaganda”, Münster: LIT Verlag, 2016 (coeditor with Cosmin Budeancă); “Politics and Peasants in Interwar Romania: Perceptions, Mentalities, Propaganda”, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017 (coeditor with Oliver Jens Schmitt); “Migration und kulturelles Erbe. Das Beispiel der deutschen Minderheiten in und aus Rumänien”, Göttingen, 2023: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlag (coeditor with Mathias Beer); “Interwar Romania: Political and Institutional Modernization and National Discourse”, 2023 (coeditor with Oliver Jens Schmitt; in Romanian).

Email:sorin.radu@ulbsibiu.ro

Ștefan Baghiu

Scientific Secretary

Ștefan Baghiu

Scientific Secretary

Stefan BAGHIU is Assistant Professor of Romanian literature and literary theory with the Department of Romance Studies at the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu and the editorial secretary of the Scopus Q1 journal Transilvania (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. He has coedited 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).

Email:andrei.terian@ulbsibiu.ro

Bogdan Crețu

Group Leader (1st Phase: c. 1500 – 1830)

Bogdan Crețu

Group Leader (1st Phase: c. 1500 – 1830)

Bogdan CREȚU is Professor of Romanian literature at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania. His scholarly interests are 18th and 19th-century Romanian literature, the history of modern literary criticism, autobiographical writing, and contemporary Romanian literature. He has published eight books of criticism, including “Negative Utopia in Romanian Literature” (in Romanian, 2008) and the two-volume “The Unicorn at the Eastern Worldʼs Gates: D. Cantemirʼs Bestiary—A Comparative Study” (in Romanian, 2013; second edition, 2021), for which he was awarded the Romanian Academy’s Titu Maiorescu Prize for Literary Criticism. He has contributed to important collective works such as “La Bible dans les littératures du monde” (edited by Sylvie Parizet, Paris: Cerf, Paris, 2016); “Romanian Literature as World Literature” (edited by Mircea Martin, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), and “Theory in the ‘Post’ Era. A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons” (edited by Alexandru Matei, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).

Email:bogdancretu1978@gmail.com

Teodora Dumitru

Group Leader (2nd Phase: 1830 – 1947)

Teodora Dumitru

Group Leader (2nd Phase: 1830 – 1947)

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 Academic, 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).

Email:teodoralilianadumitru@gmail.com

Alex Goldiș

Group Leader (3rd Phase: 1948 – 1989)

Alex Goldiș

Group Leader (3rd Phase: 1948 – 1989)

Alex GOLDIȘ is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. He is a founder and chief co-editor of Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory. He authored the volumes “Critica în tranșee. De la realismul socialist la autonomia esteticului” (Criticism in the Trenches. From Socialist Realism to Aesthetic Autonomy, Bucharest, 2011), “Sincronizarea criticii românești postbelice în deceniile opt și nouă” (Synchronization of Romanian Postwar Criticism in the 1970s and 1980s, Bucharest, 2013), and, as co-editor with Ștefan Baghiu, “Translations and Semi-peripheral Cultures. Worlding the Romanian Novel in the Modern Literary System” (Berlin, 2022). He published several studies in collective volumes and academic journals, among which “Between Transnationalism and Nation Building: Literary History as Geolocation,” in Mircea Martin, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian (eds.), “Romanian Literature as World Literature”, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

Email:alexandru.goldis@ubbcluj.ro

Mihai Iovănel

Group Leader (4th Phase: 1990 – 2025)

Mihai Iovănel

Group Leader (4th Phase: 1990 – 2025)

Mihai IOVĂNEL earned his PhD from University of Bucharest and is Senior Researcher with the G. Călinescu Institute of Literary History and Theory of the Romanian Academy. He is the author of the monographs “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), all of them in Romanian. He coedited 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, 2018), “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).

Email:mihai.iovanel@gmail.com

Andreea Mironescu

Team Member

Andreea Mironescu

Team Member

Andreea MIRONESCU is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Research. She holds a PhD in Humanistic Studies – Philology, earned in 2012 from Alexandru Ioan Cuza University. Since 2013 she co-initiated and co-organized the multidisciplinary conference “Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences”, hosted by the same institution. Between 2014-2015 she was a postdoctoral fellow in a project at the Romanian Academy. Her expertise covers Romanian and comparative literature, critical theory, and memory and postmemory studies with an emphasis on Communism. She authored a monograph in Romanian (“The Classics Affair: Paul Zarifopol and the Critique of Modernity”, 2014, in Romanian) and several articles and chapters that have come out in journals and essay collections published in Romania, Slovakia, Germany, Canada, and the UK. Currently she is the leader of the Young Team project “MEMORO: The Novel of Memory in Postcomunism: Subgenres, Generations, Transnational Networks,” financed by the Romanian Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization.

Email:andreea.mironescu@yahoo.com

Radu Vancu

Team Member

Radu Vancu

Team Member

Radu VANCU is Professor of Romanian literature at the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. Between 2019 and 2023 he has served as president of PEN Romania. He is editor-in-chief of the Transilvania journal (SCOPUS Q1) and an editor of the Poesis International magazine. He was the national editor of the Romanian section of the Poetry International website. Vancu has translated novels and poetry, mainly from English; he is also the translator of the on-going four-volume Ezra Pound edition coordinated by Horia-Roman Patapievici. He is an organizer of the International Poetry Festival in Sibiu Poets in Transylvania (2013-ongoing).

Email:rvancu@gmail.com

Dragoș Varga

Team Member

Dragoș Varga

Team Member

Dragoș VARGA is Professor of Literary Theory and Dean of the Faculty of Letters and Arts at the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania. His specialties are Romanian literature, literary theory, narratology, and aesthetics. He was the manager of the Transilvania Interethnic Cultural Center and works as an editor of the Scopus Q1 journal Transilvania. He co-edited several collective volumes and anthologies. His recent monographs are “Radu Stanca. The Aesthetic Sense of Being” (2010), “In Search of the Perfect Narrator” (2011), “Colloquials. Critical and aesthetic perspectives” (2013), “The Chronology of Romanian Literary Life: The Postwar Era”, vol. 29: 1983 (2021), all of them in Romanian.

Email:dragos.varga@ulbsibiu.ro

Adriana Stan

Team Member

Adriana Stan

Team Member

Adriana STAN is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca. She specializes in critical theory, world literature, the evolution of the novel, post-communist literature. She wrote the monograph “Bastionul lingvistic. O istorie comparată a structuralismului în România” (The Linguistic Bastion. A Comparative History of Structuralism in Romania, 2017) and co-edited an issue of Central Europe (vol. 22, no. 1, 2024), on the “Anti-Communist Novel in Postcommunist East-Central Europe.”

Email:adrstan@yahoo.ca

Imre József Balázs

Team Member

Imre József Balázs

Team Member

Imre József BALÁZS is Associate Professor at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, and research fellow at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. He published volumes in Romania and Hungary, in the academic field of the avant-garde, socialist realism, and contemporary literature. He attended regularly conferences and events organized by the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, and the International Society for the Study of Surrealism, publishing book chapters in the area with De Gruyter, Brill, UTB, Peter Lang, Bloomsbury, Anthem Press. He is editor of the cultural magazine Korunk. His most recent, award-winning book is “Rețele avangardiste, afilieri multiple” (Avant-garde Networks, Multiple Affiliations, Bucharest; Tracus Arte, 2023).

Email:lutraro@yahoo.com

Cosmin Borza

Team Member

Cosmin Borza

Team Member

Cosmin BORZA works as Researcher at the Sextil Pușcariu Institute of Linguistics and Literary History, Romanian Academy, Cluj-Napoca. He authored two books of literary criticism—"Marin Sorescu. Singur printre canonici” (Marin Sorescu. Alone among Canonical Writers, 2014) and “Dezbaterea canonică astăzi. Cazul literaturii române postbelice” (The Canonical Debate Today. The Case of Postwar Romanian Literature, 2016). He also contributed to important lexicographic projects of the Romanian Academy: “Dicționarul general al literaturii române” (The General Dictionary of Romanian Literature, second edition, 2016-2021) and “Dicționarul cronologic al romanului românesc de la origini până în 2000” (The Chronological Dictionary of the Romanian Novel from its Origins to 2000, revised and abridged, 2023). His main areas of research are: the rural novel, the subgenres of the Romanian novel, the relations between literature and ideology, and postcommunist literature.

Email:cosmi_borza@yahoo.com

Doris Mironescu

Team Member

Doris Mironescu

Team Member

Doris MIRONESCU is a literary critic and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Letters of the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași. He has published a book on Max Blecher (2011, 2nd edition 2018) and critically edited the complete works of this writer (2017). He dedicated a book to Romanian literature in the 19th century and its contemporary resonances (2016). As Researcher at the Alexandru Philippide Institute of Philology of the Romanian Academy, he is involved in the project “Encyclopedia of Romanian Memoirist Writings.” His topics of interest are literature as a vehicle of cultural memory, the conditioning of literature in postcommunism, the literature of exile and emigration and, in general, the permeable margins of Romanian literature.

Email:dorismironescu@yahoo.com

Anca Simina Martin

Team Member

Anca Simina Martin

Team Member

Anca Simina MARTIN is Assistant Professor with the Faculty of Letters and Arts at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania. Her research interests range from humor to translation studies, with her papers and articles primarily exploring the interactions between ideology, censorship, and translation. Recently, she has expanded her area of expertise to include vampire studies, signing the preface to the second edition of a newly rediscovered interwar translation of “Dracula” into Romanian (Bram Stoker, “Dracula,” Dezarticulat, 2023).

Email:anca.martin@ulbsibiu.ro

Daiana Gârdan

Team Member

Daiana Gârdan

Team Member

Daiana GÂRDAN is Teaching Assistant at the Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, where she teaches novel theory, literary geography, and gender studies. She obtained her PhD in 2021 with a thesis on the Romanian social novel. Her research focuses on transnational, sociological, and quantitative approaches to peripheral literatures (especially modern Romanian novel published between 1845 and 1940). She published her first book in 2023, entitled “Between Worlds. The Romanian Novel in the Modern Literary System” (in Romanian).

Email:daiana.gardan@ulbsibiu.ro

Ovio Olaru

Team Member

Ovio Olaru

Team Member

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).

Email:ovio.olaru@ulbsibiu.ro

Emanuel Modoc

Team Member

Emanuel Modoc

Team Member

Emanuel MODOC is Assistant Professor at the Babeș-Bolyai University, Faculty of Letters. He obtained his PhD at the Department of Comparative and Universal Literature within the Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, with a thesis on the networks of East-Central European avant-gardes. He is an Assistant Editor for the Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory and a Research Assistant at the Sextil Pușcariu Institute of Linguistics and Literary History, part of the Cluj-Napoca Branch of the Romanian Academy. He authored the volume “Internaționala periferiilor. Rețeaua avangardelor din Europa Centrală și de Est” (The International of Peripheries. Avant-Garde Networks of East-Central Europe, Bucharest: Museum of Romanian Literature Press, 2020) and edited the writings of Surrealist poet Paul Păun (Bucharest: Museum of Romanian Literature Press, 2020).

Email:ermodoc@gmail.com

Vlad Pojoga

Team Member

Vlad Pojoga

Team Member

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.

Email:vlad.pojoga@ulbsibiu.ro

A Transnational History of Romanian Literature