The Eighth Biennial SRS Book Prize brought together a group of excellent scholars from across the humanities and social sciences. We received a total of nine proposals that illustrate the vitality, sophistication, and intellectual breadth of contemporary Romanian Studies.
The winner
After careful deliberation, the Book Prize Committee – Maria Asavei, Alexandru Săvoaia, and Constantin Ardeleanu (chair) – unanimously selected Adelina Ștefan as the winner for her monograph Vacationing in Dictatorships: International Tourism in Socialist Romania and Franco’s Spain (Cornell University Press, 2024).
Ștefan’s book argues that mass tourism was not only a leisure industry, but also a powerful force of modernization and social transformation in postwar Europe. Through a carefully constructed comparison of socialist Romania and Franco’s Spain, she demonstrates that both regimes “chose to develop international tourism for similar reasons and international tourism affected the two countries in relatively similar ways, despite their different political and economic systems and their locations on different sides of the Iron Curtain.” Drawing on research conducted in a dozen archives across Europe and the United States, Ștefan shows how the influx of foreign visitors stimulated what she calls “modernization from below.” Exposure to Western consumer goods, fashions, and lifestyles challenged established gender norms and reshaped everyday life in subtle ways. By conceptualizing tourism as a form of “soft diplomacy,” Ștefan also shows how leisure culture quietly, but meaningfully transformed authoritarian regimes across Europe’s ideological and geopolitical spectrum. Thoroughly researched and elegantly written, Vacationing in Dictatorships makes a major contribution to Romanian Studies, enriching the field while also opening new avenues for comparative analysis in Cold War history.
Honourable Mentions
The Committee is also pleased to confer three Honourable Mentions (listed alphabetically by authors’ names), each recognizing a work of exceptional scholarly merit.
– Andrei Gorzo and Veronica Lazăr, Beyond the New Romanian Cinema: Romanian Culture, History, and the Films of Radu Jude (Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu Press, 2023). Gorzo and Lazăr convincingly portray Radu Jude as the defining figure of the post “New Romanian Cinema” (NRC) era. The authors trace Jude’s embrace of “impure cinema,” an approach that blends literature, archival material, and media collage in his films. In doing so, Jude departs from the aesthetic restraint and political reserve often associated with “classical” NRC directors. Gorzo and Lazăr show how Jude’s work transformed films into a site of formal experimentation and historical reckoning, confronting Romania’s violent and unresolved past. This sophisticated and insightful book serves as an introduction to Jude’s films, seen as a “useful lens through which to gaze at the NRC, at post-NRC developments, at assorted aspects of Romanian literary, artistic and political culture, at wider issues of national and regional history,” but it also demonstrates the relevance of film studies as a critical framework for further articulating and expanding the field of Romanian Studies.
– Iemima Ploscariu, Alternative Evangelicals: Challenging Nationalism in Interwar Romania’s Multi-Ethnic Borderlands (Brill, 2024). Ploscariu authors a deeply researched and analytically rigorous study of evangelical communities (Baptists, Brethren, Pentecostals, and Seventh-day Adventists) in interwar Romania. At a time when the Romanian state and the Romanian Orthodox Church promoted a unified national identity rooted in “Romanianess,” these communities cultivated congregations where faith, rather than ethnicity, defined belonging. Viewed with suspicion by authorities and dismissed as “sectarian bacteria,” evangelicals nonetheless asserted public legitimacy through print culture, transnational connections, and the mobilizing power of music. Ploscariu analyses these communities as creators of a “third space,” one that resisted the homogenizing projects of the Romanian nation-state. Ploscariu’s work engages with previously marginalised historical actors and makes an important and original contribution to the study of identity and religious pluralism in the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional provinces of interwar Romania.
– Cristina Vățulescu, Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Stories and Their Challenges (Stanford University Press, 2024). In this ambitious and thought-provoking book, Vățulescu challenges the assumption that secret police archives should be regarded as transparent repositories of “truth.” Instead, she describes them as “hostile” collections, shaped by silences, distortions, and hybrid media forms. Vățulescu warns against the “hubris of reading,” i.e., the belief that files “designed to control, misrepresent, silence, or disappear their subjects” can be made fully legible. Through carefully chosen case studies, Vățulescu demonstrates how silences or contradictions are often as revealing as the written text itself. Her proposed method of “polyphonic reading” pays attention to vulnerability, embodiment, and contradiction, thus offering an interpretive strategy that resists the discourse of the authoritarian state. In this sense, Vățulescu’s book is an essential and excellent guidebook to navigating the complexities of secret police archives in Romania, Eastern Europe, and beyond.