The committee for the 17th Society for Romanian Studies graduate student essay prize was pleased to receive eight essays or chapters in response to the call for submissions that we posted last August. The deadline for was September 30. Two essays could not be ranked because of deadline or wordcount issues. The six that we read represented a range of fields: sociology, politics, history, literature, and Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies. They came from scholars affiliated with universities in Romania (Alexandru Ioan Cuza, Ovidius, and the University of Bucharest) and in the USA (Princeton and the University of North Carolina).
After careful consideration, the committee decided unanimously to award the 17th Society for Romanian Studies Annual Graduate Student Essay Prize to Bogdan Vișan, currently an MA student at the Faculty of Letters at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iași, for his essay “The Overlap of Literary Zones: Interlingual World-making in East-Central Europe.” This was an expanded conference paper presented at the Emerging Scholars Workshop on Sources and Approaches in the Study of East-Central and Southeastern Europe, hosted by the University of North Carolina Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies in May 2025.
Bogdan Vișan’s essay builds on the work of several theorists including Galin Tihanov on literary zones, Walter Mignolo on the transnational rethinking of language and post-colonialism, and Andrei Terian on (inter)literary dependency. Vișan draws inspiration from Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcặ’s pioneering work on multi-ethnic power relations, inter-imperiality, coloniality, and modernity in Transylvania (Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires, 2022). Vișan acknowledges his intellectual debts to other critics and writers, but he coins the concept of “inter-zonality” to analyse interactions among Hungarian, Moldovan, and Romanian literary producers and their works. The paper introduces three case studies, a poet and two prose writers from Transylvania and the Republic of Moldova, whose work challenges the dominant monolingual paradigm of post-socialist Romanian literature, a field in which minority writers, along various axes, have been marginalized.
Vișan’s analysis focuses both on textual strategies and on the structural positions of “his” writers: Nóra Ugron, Andrei Dósa, and Sașa Zare. The three use different kinds of interlingual and intralingual approaches to contest ideological, cultural, and linguistic oppression, to intervene on behalf of and represent minority languages, and to resist and subvert the dominant Romanian (mono)language and culture through code-switching. These writers’ experiments in linguistic hybridity in the post-socialist period calls for “a reconceptualization of Romanian literature not as a monolingual national canon but as a multilingual constellation shaped by histories of empire, migration, and cultural contestation.” Vișan celebrates the “ethics of relation, memory, and resistance” exemplified by the poetry and prose of Ugron, Dósa, and Zare, who write not from the “centre” outward, but from the in-betweenness of “literary zones.” We welcome his invitation to pursue “multiethnic, and multilinguistic entangled cultural histories” in literature and elsewhere.
Warm regards,
Irina Livezeanu, Anca Șincan, and Marius Wamsiedel