SRS Mentors

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Florin ABRAHAM

History and Political Science

The National Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism (Romania)

Abraham Florin’s main areas of expertise include recent European history, scientific research methodology, and political ideologies of the twentieth century. He has written four monographs, most recently Romania since the Second World War: A Political, Social and Economic History (2016) He is the co-author of five other books, including The Encyclopedia of the Communist Regime in Romania, in four volumes. Florin has published over 50 studies and articles in scientific journals and collective volumes. He has participated in dozens of conferences on Romania’s recent history and in numerous research projects in Romania or in OECD countries.

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Ana BAZAC

Philosophy

Professor, Polytechnic University of Bucharest (Romania)

Ana Bazac’s research is focused on Ethics and Epistemology. She is the author of a number of books, including The Criticism of Politics (1994),Confusion and Hope (1995), Socialist Reformism (1996), Anarchism and the Modern Political Movement (2002), The Power of Civil Society (2003),Geopolitics (2003), ‘Peace’ in Iraq (2006), The Active Man and the Impersonal ‘He’ (2010). Bazac has also edited a number of edited volumes, including Political Communication (2006), Culture and Truth (2007), Logic and Social Provocations (2008), Philosophical Matrices and Integrative Concepts (2009), Philosophy and Culture (2010), The Duty: Multidisciplinary View (2012), On Justice: Multidisciplinary View (2015).

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Margaret BEISSINGER

Slavic Languages and Literatures

Research Scholar and Lecturer, Princeton University (USA)

Margaret Beissinger is an ethnographer who focuses on Balkan oral traditions and culture. She taught in the Slavic Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1989 to 2006 and since then has been at Princeton University. Beissinger’s research and teaching focus on Balkan cultures and oral traditions, oral epic, and Romani culture and music-making, with a focus on southern Romania, where she has undertaken fieldwork both before and after the 1989 revolution, especially among Romani musicians. She is the author of The Art of the Lăutar: The Epic Tradition of Romania (1991), editor of Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World (1999) and Manele in Romania: Cultural Expression and Social Meaning in Balkan Popular Music (2016), and has published numerous articles and chapters on epic, Balkan folklore, Romani music and culture, and manele. Beissinger is currently Vice President of the SRS.

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Valeska BOPP-FILIMONOV

History, Romanian Studies

Junior Professor, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena (Germany)

Valeska Bopp-Filimonov´s main research area is memory and how “ordinary citizens” coped with Romanian communism. She has worked extensively on the shortages in the 1980s under Ceauşescu. Her doctoral thesis focused more broadly on the relation between public and private accounts on the socialist time and combined discourse analyses with biographic research. She finished her studies at Leipzig University where she successfully graduated in cultural studies and later on defended her PhD at the Seminar of History. She now works at the Institute of Romance Studies and is especially interested in the development (and improvement) of the “rare subject” of Romanian Studies.

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Stefano BOTTONI

History

Senior Fellow, Research Center for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

(Hungary)

Stefano Bottoni’s main research fields are the communist nationality policy in Eastern Europe and the social impact of state security bodies in a comparative perspective. Bottoni lectured at the University of Bologna between 2005 and 2013 and was also an assistant research fellow at the University of Eastern Piedmont, POLIS Department of Political Science between 2007 and 2011. He is currently a senior fellow at the Research Center for the Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has been visiting fellow at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam and at Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena. He is a team member of the EU/Horizon-funded international project “COURAGE” on the cultural opposition in Eastern Europe under state socialism. He is particularly interested in mentoring young scholars starting research on Romania in the communist period.

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Roxana BRATU

Sociology and Criminology

Research Associate, School of Slavonic and East European Studies (UK)

Roxana Bratu is a sociologist with special reference to Criminology working as a postdoctoral research associate at UCL, SSEES. Her doctoral research focused on the process of accessing EU funding and corruption in Romania. Currently, she works on issues of law enforcement, justice, and democracy in the transnational arena, particularly related to the ‘war on corruption’. Her research also concerns metaphorical representation of corruption in the media, European Union funding and incorruption. She also works as a consultant, trains senior civil servants, and comments on current affairs for various British and international media outlets.

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Maria BUCUR

History and Gender Studies

John V. Hill Professor, Indiana University, Bloomington (USA)

Bucur’s research and teaching interests focus on European history in the modern period, especially social and cultural developments in Eastern Europe, with a special interest in Romania (geographically) and gender (thematically). She has published Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania (2002) and Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth-Century Romania (2010), in addition to numerous articles, chapters, and edited volumes on eugenics, philanthropy, the cultural history of the Great War, commemorations of World War II, and gender and war. She is particularly interested in mentoring people with interests in gender studies.

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Monica CIOBANU

Political Sociology

Professor, State University of New York at Plattsburgh (USA)

Monica Ciobanu’s current research focuses on issues of democratization, memory, truth, and justice in post-communism and especially in Romania. Her work appeared in Europe-Asia Studies, Comparative Sociology, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Nationalities Papers, and Problems of Post-Communism. She had also contributed to a number of edited volumes. In 2014-2015 she was the recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities granted by State University of New York. Ciobanu received her Ph.D. in Sociology at the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of the New School for Social Research in New York in 2005. Ciobanu sits on the Board of the SRS.

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Roland CLARK

History

Lecturer, University of Liverpool (UK)

Roland Clark’s research interests in fascism, antisemitism, social movements, student politics, lived religion, theology and nationalism, gender studies, and cultural history. His first monograph, Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (2015) concerned the everyday lives of activists in the Legion of the Archangel Michael. He has also published numerous articles and chapters on the history of the Legion and on the religious and cultural history of Romania and Eastern Europe. He is currently researching lived religion and religious change in interwar Romania. Clark is the Secretary of the SRS.

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Dennis DELETANT

History

Visiting Ion Rațiu Professor of Romanian Studies at Georgetown University and Emeritus Professor of Romanian Studies at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies

Dennis Deletant is the author of numerous works on the history of Romania including Ceauşescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965-89 (1996); Romania under Communist Rule (1998); Communist Terror in Romania: Gheorghiu-Dej and the Police State, 1948-1965 (1999); and Ion Antonescu: Hitler’s Forgotten Ally (2006). He has extensive knowledge of Romanian history and experience in teaching and supervising research students and supporting early career scholars.

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Aleksandra DJURIĆ MILOVANOVIĆ

Anthropology

Research Fellow, Institute for Balkan Studies, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts

Aleksandra Djurić Milovanović’s research has been primarily focused on the anthropology of religion and Church history, religion, and migration as well as contemporary evangelical movements in Serbia and Romania. From 2008, she has conducted extensive ethnographic and archival research in Serbia, Romania and in the United States. She is especially interested field research in multi-ethnic and multiconfessional areas in Serbia and Romania, such as Banat. For her Ph.D. research, she visited Cornell University in 2011 and 2012. Her book Double Minorities in Serbia: Distinctive Aspects of the Religion and Ethnicity of the Romanians in Vojvodina was published in 2015 by the Institute for Balkan Studies (Belgrade, Serbia). Aleksandra is a co-editor of the forthcoming volume Orthodox Christian Renewal Movements in Eastern and Southeastern Europe.

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Donald DYER

Slavic and Balkan Linguistics

Associate Dean and Professor, University of Mississippi (USA)

Donald Dyer’s research interests include Slavic and Balkan linguistics, Bulgarian and the Romanian of Moldova, as well as languages in contact. He has published Word Order in the Simple Bulgarian Sentence: A Study in Grammar, Semantics, and Pragmatics (1992) and The Romanian Dialect of Moldova: A Study in Language and Politics (1999) together with numerous articles and book chapters. He is currently editor of the journal Balkanistica and co-editor of Romance Monographs. He is also Vice President of the Bulgarian Studies Association. Dyer prefers to communicate in English.

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Gábor EGRY

History

Director-General, Institute of Political History Budapest (Hungary)

Gábor Egry’s research focuses on nationalism, ethnicity, and the politics of identity in modern East-Central Europe. His last book, Etnicitás, identitás, politika. Magyar kisebbségek nacionalizmus és regionalizmus között Csehszlovákiában és Romániában (Napvilág, Budapest: 2015) [Ethnicity, identity, politics. Hungarian minorities between nationalism and regionalism in Romania and Czechoslovakia 1918-1944], was shortlisted for the Felczak-Wereszycki Prize of the Polish Historical Association. He has received several prestigious academic fellowships including being a Fulbright Visiting Research Fellow at Stanford University, Europa Fellow at NEC-Bucharest, and a fellow at Imre Kertész Kolleg, Jena. He is currently the PI for the ERC Consolidator project: “Negotiating Post-imperial Transitions: From Remobilization to Nation-state Consolidation. A comparative study of local and regional transitions in post-Habsburg East and Central Europe”.

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Peter GROSS

Mass Communication/International Communication

Professor, University of Tennessee (USA)

Gross’s scholarship focuses on media systems and journalism in Eastern Europe and he is the author/co-author of eight book and dozens of monograph chapters, scholarly articles, book and journal introductions, encyclopedia articles, and book reviews in American and European academic and professional journals. Gross has worked extensively in Western and East-Central Europe and in several former Soviet Republics and was instrumental in establishing a new journalism program in 1992 at Universitatea din Timişoara de Vest. He served as consultant on East European media issues and as an educational consultant to numerous media outlets. Gross served as a Ratings Review and Advisor (2013-2016) for the Freedom House’s yearly Freedom of the Press Index.

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Bob IVES

Education and Ethnic Relations

Associate Professor, University of Nevada, Reno (USA)

Bob Ives has been a faculty member at a research university in the US since 2002. His recent work investigates academic integrity in higher education, as well as the relationship between Roma and educational systems in Eastern Europe. He has also published research related to educational assessment and measurement and teaching methods in mathematics for students who struggle. Ives prefers to communicate in English.

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James KAPALÓ

Religious Studies

Senior Lecturer, University College Cork (Ireland)

James Kapaló’s main research interests are minority religions in Eastern and Central Europe in the twentieth century, folk and material religion, and religions in the secret police archives in post-communist states. He is the author of Text, Context, and Performance: Gagauz Folk Religion in Discourse and Practice (2008) and a forthcoming monograph Inochentism and Russian Orthodoxy (2017). Methodologically James Kapaló works at the interface between history, anthropology, and folklore, exploring vernacular knowledge, folk practices and local memory as a counterpoint to national narratives that tend to wash over religious, folk and local cultural meanings. He is Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project ‘Creative Agency and Religious Minorities: Hidden Galleries in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe’ and co-Director of the Marginalised and Endangered Worldviews Study Centre (MEWSC). Kapaló prefers to communicate in English and is particularly interested in working with someone who wishes to work on some aspect of religions and/or minorities.

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Irina LIVEZEANU

History

Associate Professor of History, University of Pittsburgh (USA)

Irina Livezeanu’s research interests extend geographically to Romania, Moldova and East Central Europe more generally, particularly in the twentieth century; and thematically with nationalism, Jews, intellectuals, the avant-garde, and gender. Livezeanu has written Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 1918-1930 (1995), and she has edited The Routledge History of East Central Europe since 1700(2017); and Women & Gender in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia and Eurasia: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Vol. I Southeastern and East Central Europe (2007). She is the most recent past president of the Society for Romanian Studies and co-editor of the Romanian Studies book series at Polirom.

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Paul MICHELSON

History, Political Science, Geography

Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus, Huntington University

Paul E. Michelson is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Huntington University. He has been three times a Fulbright fellow in Romania (1971-1973, 1982-1983, 1989-1990). His book, Romanian Politics, 1859-1871: From Prince Cuza to Prince Carol (1998) was selected by CHOICE MAGAZINEas an Outstanding Academic Book for 1998 and was awarded the 2000 Bălcescu Prize for History by the Romanian Academy. He is on the editorial board of a dozen journals. His areas of interest and expertise include historiography, Romanian history in the 19th-21st Centuries, and Totalitarian and post-Totalitarian societies. He is past President and Secretary of the Society for Romanian Studies and served as the Secretary of the Conference on Faith and History.

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Petru NEGURĂ

Sociology, Social Work, and History

Lecturer and Researcher, Free International University from Moldova (Chişinău)

Petru Negură holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and has been a research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley (CASE Program, Carnegie Foundation’s scholarship, and Fulbright visiting scholar). He is the author of Ni héros, ni traîtres. Les écrivains moldaves face au pouvoir soviétique sous Staline (2009). His current research deals with intellectuals and public education in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and with social welfare services in the USSR and post-Soviet Moldova.

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Sergiu MUSTEAŢĂ

History and Geography

Professor, „Ion Creangă” State Pedagogical University, Chişinău (Moldova)

Sergiu Musteaţă, a historian from the Republic of Moldova, has published seven monographs and more than 200 articles on history, cultural heritage preservation and textbooks analysis. He is the editor of two monograph series – ANTIM monographs and Unknown Documents and Histories (over 20 volumes published) and edits the young historian’s annual journal and Plural. History. Culture. Society Journal. Every year he does over twenty presentations and public lectures in various academic centers around the world. During recent years he has been a visiting scholar and a visiting professor in universities in USA, Germany, Romania, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden and other countries.

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Valentin SĂNDULESCU

History

Assistant Professor, University of Bucharest (Romania)

Valentin Săndulescu’s research interests cover interwar Romanian history, the history and historiography of fascism and antisemitism (with an emphasis on the Romanian Iron Guard), and also the history of the Jewish community in Romania. He has a Ph.D. in history from the Central European University in Budapest and has held fellowships at institutes of advanced studies in Sofia and Bucharest. In May 2010 he has been a Junior Visiting Research Associate at the Modern European History Research Centre, Faculty of History, University of Oxford. He is currently involved in two major research projects funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation in Germany and the UEFISCDI in Romania.

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Mihaela TEODOR

History and Security Studies

Senior Researcher, National Institute for Intelligence Studies

Mihaela Teodor is a Senior Researcher in Security Studies (MVNIA-NIIS, 2014), where she develops and implements research activities and has management responsibilities as Editor in Chief of the Romanian Intelligence Studies Review. Her area of expertise is in European and Romanian contemporary history (BA from UAIC RO, 2003) and European integration and security studies (MA from UAIC RO, 2005). She holds a PhD in History (UAIC RO, 2011). She has been part of several research projects with European and national funding (PN II TE), where she has worked as an expert or researcher (CRESCEnt – ERASMUS+, CITY COP – H2020, GRAVITAS, ESSENTIAL – H2020).

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Ruxandra TRANDAFOIU

Communication

Reader, Edge Hill University (UK)

Ruxandra Trandafoiu has had a long-term research interest in post-1989 democratization processes in Eastern Europe and EU politics. Her research has primarily focused on the role of new media technologies in the development of new forms of political engagement by migrant groups and national minorities. She is the author of Diaspora Online: Identity Politics and Romanian Migrants (Berghahn 2013) and the co-editor of The Globalization of Musics in Transit: Music Migration and Tourism (Routledge 2013) and Media and Cosmopolitanism (Peter Lang 2014). More recent publications have focused on Roma migration to western Europe and, in particular, the Roma expulsions from France in 2010. Ruxandra has also published on Eurosceptic discourses in the British and the Irish press. Current research projects investigate the role of trauma, dislocation, and memory in creative processes within diasporic visual arts and the impact of Brexit on EU citizens within the UK North-West context.

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Lavinia STAN

Political Science

Professor, St. Francis Xavier University (Canada)

A Comparative Politics specialist, Stan is interested in democracy and democratization, especially religion and politics, and transitional justice. She has authored/edited eleven books, published by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Routledge and others, and over 45 scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals. A former member of the Scientific Council of the IICCMER, former expert for the Directorate-General for Justice, Freedom and Security of the European Commission, and former chair of the Wildavski Award Committee of the Political Science Association, she has served as an Associate Editor for Women’s Studies International Forum since 2009, and as Editorial Board member for over twenty academic journals (including EEPS, Human Rights Review, and Politics & Religion). Stan is currently President of the SRS.

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Cristian TILEAGĂ

Social Psychology

Senior Lecturer, Loughborough University

Cristian Tileaga is a member of the Discourse and Rhetoric Group in the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture at Loughborough University in the UK. He has a general interest in social memory and transitional justice, discourse analysis, political psychology, and interdisciplinarity. He is the co-author of Psychology and History: Interdisciplinary Explorations (Cambridge University Press, 2014), an edited volume exploring the problems and possibilities of interdisciplinarity. He is the author of Political Psychology: Critical Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and, more recently, of The Nature of Prejudice: Society, Discrimination and Moral Exclusion (Routledge, 2015).

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Narcis TULBURE

Anthropology and Finance

Junior Assistant Professor, Bucharest University of Economic Studies

Narcis Tulbure’s research focuses on the transfer of economic knowledge between East and West during and after the Cold War as well as on the way the transfer of financial technologies and organizational forms mediated the postsocialist transition in Eastern Europe. He has taught courses on the anthropology of money, the sociology of financial markets, and the pragmatics of contracts at the University of Bucharest, as well as courses and seminars in finance at the Bucharest University of Economic Studies. Tulbure has studied at the Bucharest University of Economic Studies (BA), Central European University (MA), and the University of Pittsburgh (PhD). He has published in leading journals and collected volumes and has held a number of prestigious fellowships in Romania and the US.

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F. Peter WAGNER

Political Science

Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater (USA)

Peter Wagner’s research interests include European politics, transatlantic relations, foreign and security policy, and the Left in the United States and Europe. He teaches courses on European politics, international relations, US-American Foreign Policy, and global perspectives. His publications include Rudolf Hilferding: Theory and Politics of Democratic Socialism (1996), “A Finger for Berlusconi”: Italy’s Anti-Immigration/Anti-Crime Measures, Romanian Realities, and the Poverty of European Citizenship (2009) and “US–Italian Relations: The Need for a New Frame,” in: Grasse/Grimm/Labitzke (Hrsg. / a cura di), Italien zwischen Krise und Aufbruch: Auf dem Weg zur dritten Republik? (2017).

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Rodica Milena ZAHARIA

Corporate social responsibility, migration issues, and higher education

Professor, Bucharest University of Economic Studies (Romania)

Rodica Milena Zaharia is Professor at the Department of International Business and Economics at the Bucharest University of Economic Studies. Her research interests cover areas as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), higher education development, and migration issues. She has published articles and chapter in books and coordinated research grants that cover different aspects of CSR, from employees’ related issues to SMEs or CSR of higher education institutions. In 2014 she was a Fulbright scholar, with a research grant at Marywood University, USA in the area of CSR and community issues. She is particularly interested in working with someone in a related discipline to her own. Zaharia sits on the Board of the SRS.

Our mentors are particularly interested in working with mentees on the following topics:

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Discussing the state of the field

Florin Abraham, Stefano Bottoni, Roxana Bratu, Monica Ciobanu, Roland Clark, James Kapaló, Paul Michelson, Sergiu Musteaţă,  Petru Negură, Valentin Săndulescu, Mihaela Teodor, Narcis Tulbure, F. Peter Wagner, Rodica Milena Zaharia

Networking

Valeska Bopp-Filimonov, Monica Ciobanu, Aleksandra Djurić Milovanović, Donald Dyer, Gábor Egry, James Kapaló, Paul Michelson, Sergiu Musteaţă, Petru Negură, Valentin Săndulescu, Lavinia Stan, Mihaela Teodor, Rodica Milena Zaharia

Working in libraries and archives

Stefano Bottoni, Maria Bucur, Roland Clark, Gábor Egry, Aleksandra Djurić Milovanović, James Kapaló,  Paul Michelson, Sergiu Musteaţă, Petru Negură, Valentin Săndulescu, Lavinia Stan, Narcis Tulbure

Researching, writing, and publishing in internationally recognized journals

Margaret Beissinger, Roxana Bratu, Maria Bucur, Monica Ciobanu, Roland Clark, Aleksandra Djurić Milovanović, Donald Dyer, Peter Gross, Bob Ives, Irina Livezeanu, Paul Michelson,  Sergiu Musteaţă, Ruxandra Trandafoiu, Lavinia Stan, Mihaela Teodor, Cristian Tileaga, Narcis Tulbure, Rodica Milena Zaharia

Putting together a book proposal for an internationally reputed press

Donald Dyer, Sergiu Musteaţă, Ruxandra Trandafoiu, Lavinia Stan, Cristian Tileaga

Developing strategies for acceptance into graduate schools

Roxana Bratu, Maria Bucur, Donald Dyer, Ruxandra Trandafoiu, Cristian Tileaga, Narcis Tulbure, F. Peter Wagner

Teaching

Margaret Beissinger, Valeska Bopp-Filimonov, Roland Clark, Donald Dyer

Discussing theories and research methodologies

Florin Abraham, Valeska Bopp-Filimonov, Roland Clark, Gábor Egry, Peter Gross, Bob Ives, James Kapaló, Mihaela Teodor, Cristian Tileaga, F. Peter Wagner

Researching in Romania

Gábor Egry, Valentin Săndulescu, Rodica Milena Zaharia

Working in British academia

Roxana Bratu, Roland Clark, Ruxandra Trandafoiu