Call for Papers: Borders and Transfers

15-17 June 2022
Society for Romanian Studies
Hosted by Universitatea de Vest and Muzeul de Artă, Timişoara

The Banat is “a reality, and at the same time a myth,
situated at the place where borders meet.”
– Adriana Babeţi (2007)

The Society for Romanian Studies invites you to Timişoara in June 2022, where the soup is sweet and it is bad luck to serve chicken on New Year’s Day. Timişoara, and the Banat more generally, has been shaped by the borders of empires and nation-states, by ethnic, religious, cultural, and economic transfers, and by the cultures flowing along the Mureş, Danube, and Tisza rivers. A melting-pot whose local realities reflect transnational influences, Timişoara is an ideal place for us to reflect on how borders and transfers – both real and imagined – shape the culture and society of the diverse peoples connected to Romania and Moldova. Raising and crossing borders is becoming more contentious than ever, and new boundaries are being thrown up around and within communities, both in the region and in its diaspora, yet the transfer of goods and information continues at an unprecedented rate.

Keynote speakers:
Professor Maria Bucur (Indiana University, Bloomington)
Professor Adriana Babeţi (Universitatea de Vest, Timişoara)

The conference is concerned with the following topics:

• How borders and transfers facilitate group formation; what they exclude and whose interests they protect and reinforce.
• How borders are imagined, made real, and enforced.
• The impact of the pandemic on travel and crossing borders.
• The difference between spoken and unspoken borders and transfers.
• Liminal spaces in literature, art and film.
• Transfers, influences and connections between texts.
• Borders as limits on beliefs and imagination.
• Rites of passage, liminality and blockages in space or time. This might involve ageing, travel, career progression, or metaphysics.
• The contestation of boundaries and restrictions. When are transfers liberating and when are they perilous?
• Political and military borders in time and space.
• Corruption as the transgression of regulations and the function of discourses about legal, economic, and behavioral boundaries.
• Borders and transfers as they relate to the social and cultural performance of gender and sexuality.
• Interdisciplinarity as a goal and a challenge. The value and limits of disciplinary borders.
• Border-making as governmentality versus borders that are constructed and challenged from below.
• Processes of marginalisation, division, and solidarity.
• Linguistic borders, multilingualism and its social and political implications.
• Refugees, migration, population exchanges, and ethnic cleansing.

The official language of the conference is English, but papers, panels, roundtables, and discussions may also be delivered in Romanian. Each panel or roundtable will have only one language (English or Romanian), which will be printed on the official program.

At present we are planning to hold the conference face to face, with no hybrid option. If the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic makes this unfeasible we will communicate alternatives as soon as possible.

Proposals for individual papers, panels, roundtables, book or movie presentations, and art installations should be sent by October 25, 2021, to srs2022conference@gmail.com. Participants will be notified of the acceptance of their proposal at the latest by January 25, 2022. Proposals should be written in the language you wish to present in.
• Individual paper proposals should include a title, a brief abstract of up to 500 words, a one-page c.v. (one page), and contact information of the presenter.
• Proposals for panels including 3-4 papers, one chair, and 1-2 discussants should provide a title and description of the panel topic, abstracts of all papers, a one-page c.v., and contact information for all participants. Panel participants should be drawn from at least two different universities/ research institutes.
• Roundtable proposals of 3-5 participants should include a title and description of the topic, a one-page c.v., and contact information for all participants.
• In addition, the conference organizers will accept proposals for presentations of books, movies and art installations; proposals should include a title, a description, a one-page C.V., and contact information.

Conference registration fees:
• For individuals earning more than the equivalent of over $15,000 (USD) per year:
o $120 (USD): This includes an Individual Membership to the SRS for 2022 and an electronic subscription to the Journal of Romanian Studies for 2022.
o $100 (USD): This includes a Discount Membership* to the SRS for 2022.
• For individuals earning less than the equivalent of under $15,000 (USD) per year: $30 (USD). This includes a Discount Membership* to the SRS for 2022.
• For life members and individuals who have already taken out three-year memberships: $20 (USD).
• For students: $15 (USD).

*NB. Discount Members do not receive a subscription to the Journal of Romanian Studies.

There is a limited number of fee waivers for people with modest incomes sponsored by the PLURAL Forum for Interdisciplinary Studies, Moldova. Please contact the conference organizers for details.

The Society for Romanian Studies is an international interdisciplinary academic organization based in the US and dedicated to promoting research and critical studies on all aspects of the culture and society of the diverse peoples connected to Romania and Moldova. For more information about the SRS see https://srstudies.org/

The Society for Romanian Studies announces the winner of the Third Biennial SRS Book Prize for 2015: Sean Cotter’s Literary Translation and the Idea of a Minor Romania (Rochester, 2014). The book prize committee, consisting of Holly Case (Cornell, History, Chair), James Augerot (University of Washington, Slavic Languages and Literatures) and Vladimir Solonari (University of Central Florida, History) solicited nominations for the best book published in English in any field of Romanian studies (including Moldova) in the humanities or social sciences.

The books this year were of very high quality. In the end, Sean Cotter’s book stood out as an exceptional example of rigorous scholarship and original argument. The book wonders “Under what conditions could literary translation move to the center of the national imagination?” To do so, he makes the “minor” status of Romanian culture into an interpretive mechanism, largely through following the careers of Lucian Blaga, Constantin Noica, and Emil Cioran in the aftermath of the Second World War. Being minor is not merely a matter of size or scale, but a matter of nature and type, a “translated nation,” as he calls it. The Soviet occupation prompted Cotter’s protagonists to “rethink the country in minor terms.” Tracing literary debates, personal dilemmas, and translations of their work and ideas both within and beyond Romania, Cotter shows that the essence of “minor” cultures can be read through careful analysis of translation practices.

The committee also recognizes Moshe Idel’s Mircea Eliade: From Magic to Myth (Peter Lang, 2013) with an honorable mention. Idel presents Eliade in an admiring light, yet does not hesitate to include the various blemishes in the wide-ranging career of one of the best-known Romanian writers of the twentieth Century.

The Society for Romanian Studies is pleased to award the 2013 Society for Romanian Studies Biennial Book Prize to Peasants under Siege: the Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949-1962 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), by Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery.  Peasants under Siege was selected from among a very strong field of English language books which appeared between January 2011 and December 2012.  Entries for the prize included a large number of excellent works from multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. 

The prize selection committee appreciated the scope and rigor of the research undertaking upon which Peasants under Siege is based. The book builds upon the authors’ decades of experience doing field research in rural Romania. Kligman and Verdery make use of multiple types of sources, including archives, the communist press and extensive interviews, to analyze the relationship between the collectivization of agriculture in Romania and the process of party and state building that transformed the countryside and Romanian society as a whole. The authors stress that in the process of collectivization, the Party apparatus and the Securitate were not only changing property relations according to the Soviet model but also creating the new institutions of the Party-state through local practices and policies they devised in and for Romania. An important part of the documentary research that underpins the study was carried out in the Securitate archives (CNSAS). The authors’ field work, along with that of the other nineteen researchers from various disciplines who collaborated on the project, provides a wealth of intimate detail from the point of view of the participants in the collectivization process that refines and modifies the picture that emerges from Party reports and similar documentary sources. 

In sum, Peasants under Siege represents a central contribution to the literature on Romania during the communist period, and indeed on the history of collectivization in other contexts, as well. Because the communist past is an ongoing battlefield in the present-day politics of memory in Romania, an accurate history establishing the extent of participation in and the full range of responses to collectivization is all the more important.  Kligman and Verdery demonstrate with great subtlety the particular ways in which the Soviet model was carried out in the particular Romanian context. As the authors write: “Blueprints may provide a plan, but social practices are not so easily hammered or welded into place.” In Romania collectivization was as much negotiated as it was violent. The authors skillfully reconstruct what it created (a new kind of state, society and “person”) while simultaneously offering a full account of what it destroyed (communities and lives).

This beautifully conceived and clearly written work of history, anthropology and sociology shows how fruitful it can be to ignore the boundaries between disciplines in the interest of gaining insight into the fraught nexus between society and state. Peasants under Siege will provide a valuable guide to scholars seeking to understand rural transformation in the region for years to come, and serve as a primary reference point for those wishing to understand what really happened in the long decade of the 1950s in Romania, and what it meant for those who lived it.

The 2013 SRS Biennial Book Prize Selection Committee:  William Crowther, (chair), Holly Case and Valentina Glajar.

Committee: Delia Popescu (Chair), Inessa Medzhibovskaya, and Benjamin Thorne.

The committee evaluated ten entries, most of which were high quality historical or sociological work. Ion Matei Costinescu won the prize with his “Interwar Romania and the Greening of the Iron Cage: The Biopolitics of Dimitrie Gusti, Virgil Madgearu, Mihail Manoilescu, and Ştefan Zeletin.” This is a chapter from his dissertation on The Village as Quest for Modernity: The Bucharest Sociological School and the Romanian Alternative Way, which he has been completing at the University of Bucharest. The dissertation explores the work of the Bucharest Sociological School in interwar Romania to propose an “alternative modernity project configured along biopolitical lines.” Costinescu offers a constructivist twist to a Weberian argument by recasting the notion of the iron cage in the terms of the Bucharest Sociological School. The chapter offers an impressive critical assessment of alternate visions of modernity, which propose the biopolitical transformation of the people, and the creation of a new national ethos infused with a mythos of superior moral and ethnic value. Costinescu suggests that the Weberian model was adapted to accommodate such a new vision of the state imbued with a new and mobilizing “secular magic” of Romanian nationalism. The essay leads with a robust critical argument that is well developed, interesting, and contributes to developments in the field. The strong theoretical focus of the piece offers a much needed and nuanced addition to the small but extremely important literature on Romanian biopolitics by focusing on the latter half of the compound term, politics. It is an important intervention that both deepens and expands our knowledge of the period, is well-researched and engagingly written. Many congratulations to Ion Matei Costinescu for a fascinating essay!

Honorable mentions

Madalina Valeria Veres’ “Constructing Imperial Spaces: Habsburg Cartography in the Age of Enlightenment” is an important contribution to the study of historiography and the geopolitics of space in Central and Eastern Europe. Her imaginative and objective interpretation is based on the examination of rare archival material, which is organized with impeccable fairness and scholarly tact. This beautifully written piece is a comprehensive and compelling presentation of patterns by means of which constructs enter politics, a sobering invitation to take nothing for granted– and to reinvigorate the analysis of what appears to be a closed topic. The submission is part of her doctoral dissertation, titled Mastering Space: The Great Military Map of Transylvania, which she is completing at the University of Pittsburgh.

Zsuzsanna Magdo’s “Ceausescu’s Thaw and Religiosity: The Central Committee Considers Atheism, 1965-1974” examines the sort of political dialectic occasioned by the encounter of communist state policy and Romanian cultural religiosity. The essay makes use of archival documents from the Department of Religious Cults, the Committee of Historical Monuments, and the Ministry of Culture, to propose a compelling and sophisticated analysis of the “religion question” in the autochthonous modernity project delineated by the Romanian communist state. Magdo offers an interesting and well-researched historiography with a strong argument that leads to a rich picture that traces historical developments and transformations in the context of communist ideological development. Magdo recasts the politico-ideological interchange between Marxism, modernity, and national spiritual life. The clear and prominent integration of archival material on Agitprop is a particular highlight of the essay, and Magdo succeeds in being both informative, analytical, and infusing the occasional sense of humor, which smooth the way to an enjoyable and thought-provoking piece of reading.  Magdo’s entry is part of her dissertation, The Socialist Sacred: Atheism, Religion, and Culture in Communist Romania, 1948-1989, which she is completing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Sixth Annual Graduate Student Essay Prize was presented to Roxana Lucia Cazan for her “Jewish Motherhood, Heritage, and Post-memory in Anca Vlasopolos’s No Return Address and Haya Leah Molnar’s Under a Red Sky,” a chapter from her dissertation on Contested Motherhood: The Politics of Gender, Ethnicity, and Identity in Contemporary Romanian-American Literature and Culture, which she has been completing at Indiana University Bloomington. Oscillating between disciplines and geographical scales, Cazan’s essay gave a truly transnational, comparative, and global edge to Romanian Studies. Cazan examined the meaning of motherhood in a complex prism of Romanian state communism, Jewish identity, the Shoah, communist pro-natalism and post-memory. The essay was impressive both for its conceptual approach and its contents. We learn about two fascinating books by Anca Vlasopolos (No Return to Address: Memoir of a Deplacement) and Haya Leah Molnar (Under a Red Sky: Memoir of A Childhood in Communist Romania), which, in turn, entices the reader to discover and read these books independently. Dealing with two periods of repression – the Fascist period (1920s-1940s) and the early Communist period (1950s-1960s) – Cazan reflects on identity, gender, and memory. What does a memoir by a Romanian Jewish émigré tell us about modern Romanian history, society, and debates about the past? Quite a lot: Cazan’s piece challenges more comfortable boundaries of what constitutes Romanian Studies. Not only is her work interdisciplinary, but the subject matter under investigation highlights that ‘Romanian Studies’ has a global, transnational dimension to it, and thus forces us to re-examine what and where the boundaries of Romanian Studies lie. The author and protagonist of the first novel under investigation (Vlasopolos) is a point in case: a Romanian Jew of Greek origin who leaves Romania with her mother in the early Communist period having lived through the earlier Fascist period. They end up in Detroit, via Western Europe, where Vlasopolos marries a German-American and starts a family. In this intricate web of travel, exile, and memory, Vlasopolos writes her memoir reflecting on a ruptured 20th century. Such stories and Cazan’s masterful analysis compel us to think of Romanian Studies not as an isolated field, but one that is marked by war, exile, movement, cross-border experience and multifaceted identity. Interdisciplinary and very ‘fuzzy round the edges’, Cazan’s work reminds SRS how exciting, diverse, and multifarious research in and around Romanian Studies is. Long may it continue.

Committee: Roland Clark (chair), Margaret Beissinger, Oana Armeanu.

The SRS awarded the 2013 graduate student essay prize to Dr. Florin Poenaru, who successfully defended his PhD in Sociology to Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, in October 2013. The ten submissions considered for this year’s prize included a number of outstanding essays and the committee was at times fascinated, horrified, intrigued, and impressed by the findings of these authors. Poenaru’s contribution entitled “The Illusion of Anti-Communism: Articulating Anti-Hegemonic Struggles in Post-Communism” stood out for its clarity, originality, extensive research, and theoretical depth. A chapter of the author’s PhD dissertation on intellectual debates in contemporary Romania, the essay explores the challenges faced by young intellectuals disillusioned with the mainstream critiques of the country’s communist past. Poenaru uses a collected volume entitled Iluzia anti-comunismului: lecturi critice ale Raportului Tismăneanu (Chişinău: Cartier, 2008) as a case study of conflict between politically, economically, and socially influential intellectuals and a group of much younger but passionate and articulate writers. Studying networks of intellectuals as they compete for hegemony over limited resources, Poenaru exposes the limits of Romania’s post-Socialist public sphere and the impact of a transitional market economy on intellectual discourse. He shows how members of the younger generation are forming alliances with their elders to generate a conversation based on universal and standardized values that challenges the celebrity culture of mainstream anti-communism. Writing on a delicate and highly politicized subject, Poenaru’s approach is balanced, sophisticated, and highly analytical. On behalf of the SRS the committee would like to congratulate Dr. Poenaru!

Committee: Margaret Beissinger, James Koranyi, and Paul Sum.

The Fourth Graduate Student Essay Award was presented at the 2012 ASEEES conference in New Orleans, LA to Jonathan Stillo (City University of New York) for his outstanding essay titled “We are the losers of Socialism”: Tuberculosis, Social Cases and Limits of Care in Romania’. A doctoral student in Cultural Anthropology at the City University of New York, Jonathan exposes the complex relationships between the state’s “social contract,” former middle-class industrial workers, and social care in post-1989 Romania. Based on two years of fieldwork, including a six-month stint living in a TB sanatorium, Jonathan presents a trenchant and revealing analysis of tuberculosis in post-socialist Romania. He effectively incorporates the testimonies of those affected by the social issues that surround tuberculosis in contemporary Romania, showcasing the disturbing and dismal plight of the victims of TB. The project that Jonathan has tackled is challenging, yet his findings are striking and indeed moving, as he places the individual voices of those who treat as well as endure TB at the very centre of his analyses. Jonathan introduces, for example, a fraught nurse in Northern Moldova attempting to help a middle-aged TB sufferer and alcoholic. He includes other equally harrowing narratives of broken individuals such as Tudor who, at the age of fifty, has been homeless for twelve years without any social network to support him. In short, Jonathan assembles a meticulously researched mosaic, which informs broader debates on health and society in contemporary post-socialist Europe and indeed the wider world. The research presented in this essay is much-needed and promises to generate additional work that will comprise important contributions to the field. The SRS Graduate Student Essay Prize committee was unanimous in selecting Jonathan’s work as the very best from a truly excellent array of submitted essays. It is clear from Jonathan’s findings and his writing that a great deal of both academic and emotional labour has gone into his work, and for this he is hugely deserving of the 2012 Graduate Student Essay Prize of the Society for Romanian Studies.

Committee: Margaret Beissinger, Peter Wagner, Lavinia Stan.

The committee unanimously chosen Tom Gallagher’s Romania and the European Union: How the Weak Vanquished the Strong (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009) as the best book in Romanian Studies published in English in 2009-2010. The study was a clear first choice because of its highly contemporary and relevant subject matter, original and provocative analyses, logical approach, and lucid style. Romania and the European Union is a remarkable account of how corruption penetrated Romania’s entry into the EU in 2007. It relates how the local elite not only managed to orchestrate admission into the EU on the basis of an astonishingly minor set of changes but also how Romania has left promises of significant reform  unfulfilled. Gallagher’s own unparalleled familiarity with Romania and its politicians greatly informs his novel interpretations. Original and courageous in his interpretations, Gallagher masterfully integrates case study and EU accession study by laboriously identifying the various points of contention that surfaced during the years of negotiation over Romania’s entry to the EU and the ways in which all of those points were disregarded and even shoved aside. The Romanians involved in the EU discussions were able to pull the wool over the eyes of the anxious and uncertain EU leadership, gaining accession with only a measly agenda for reform. He shows how local figures falsely persuaded the EU that they would satisfy many of the economic criteria for membership, thus convincing the EU to disregard the violations that would occur and even those then taking place. Gallagher furnishes a disturbing account of the long-standing deceit and exploitation among Romania’s post-communist elite as well as the EU leadership’s inability to detect and counteract such conduct. Romania and the European Union is a major contribution to Romanian and European studies, a commanding and convincing monograph that is relevant far beyond Romania as the “West” and “East” Europes of the Cold War now seek to eliminate boundaries. EU accession has been the single most important historical event in post-communist Romania. It is fitting, then, that the SRS Book Prize be awarded to Gallagher, whose intrepid and chilling account of Romanian-EU maneuvers over the past ten years offers an extraordinary analysis of these events—an original and powerful reading that boldly confronts and challenges many of the conventional political views and insights. It is a truly great case study. Congratulations, Tom Gallagher, for this seminal and provocative contribution to Romanian Studies! Tom Gallagher taught in the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford.

The Third Graduate Student Essay Prize was presented at the 2011 ASEEES conference in Washington, D.C. to Cristina Onose (University of Toronto) for her paper “EU Funding to Romanian SMEs: A Blueprint for Bankruptcy?”

The Second Graduate Student Essay Prize was presented to Anca Mandru (University of Illinois) for her paper “Recurrent, Integrative, and Anti-Statist? Cultural Nationalism as Embodied in the Summer School at Valenii de Munte, Romania (1908-1940).” The essay was chosen because of its excellent style, grounded connections to theory, and overall contribution to the field of Romanian Studies. The goal of the paper is to apply John Hutchinson’s theory of cultural nationalism to the case of a series of summer schools organized by Nicolae Iorga at Valenii de Munte before and during the Greater Romania period between the World Wars. The case study also tests the validity of Hutchinson’s model. The essay is clearly and engagingly written, providing substantial background on both the relevant theories of nationalism and the historical context of the treated summer schools. The discussion and conclusions highlight how the summer schools contributed to the historical and political events of the time in considerable detail, however the essay remains accessible and informative even for the non-specialized reader. The essay is an outstanding example of how a case study can inform both historical knowledge and broader theoretical concerns. For this reason, Mandru’s essay stood out for all evaluators as the winner. The paper examines the summer school organized by the Romanian nationalist historian and politician Nicolae Iorga at Valenii de Munte in the interwar period from the perspective of John Hutchinson’s theory of cultural nationalism. Iorga’s summer school is here used as a case-study for testing the theory’s main premises, namely the recurrent, integrative and anti-statist character of cultural nationalism. Examining the challenges posed by the creation of Greater Romania and the subsequent integration of minorities and Romanians from the new provinces in the new state, the paper argues that Iorga’s otherwise traditional ideology was nevertheless integrative, aiming at creating a unified national culture. While Iorga’s project was characterized by strong anti-statist rhetoric, this paper argues that in fact the survival of cultural nationalism in the form promoted by the summer school at Valenii de Munte depended on support from, and cooperation with, the authorities, thus undermining John Hutchinson’s assumption of the essentially adversarial relation between cultural nationalism and the state. Anca Mandru is a doctoral student in History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She holds a Master’s degree in Central European History from the Central European University in Budapest and a Bachelor’s degree in History from the American University in Bulgaria. She has received numerous awards related to her outstanding academic work, has presented two conference papers, and has a research article under review at a major journal. Her winning essay was written in the Spring Semester, 2010, for a course entitled “Introduction to Historical Writing.”