Committee: Margaret Beissinger, Lavinia Stan, and Ileana Orlich.

The First SRS Graduate Student Essay Prize went to Roland Clark, a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, for his paper “Singing Fascist Style: Music in the Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael.” The committee wrote: “It was a very fine essay. We found that it was well written, well documented, with a clearly defined research question, and well argued. Clark’s findings on the role of music in the Iron Guard were fascinating and his interpretations were superb. His essay contained definitions ‘of appropriate terms (‘legionary’) based on a diversity of information sources, included Securitate documents obtained recently by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.’ We also all felt that it was a topic that has not been covered adequately in the English-language literature on the Iron Guard.” Exploiting a support base built by earlier Romanian anti-Semites, the Legion of the Archangel Michael was established by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899-1938) in 1927, and took power in a coup together with General Antonescu in 1940, ruling for five months before the regime disintegrated in an open legionary rebellion. Song lyrics articulated legionary ideology, but the music also communicated messages about unity, virulence, and ethnic specificity. It expressed the legionaries’ love affair with the peasantry, their romanticization of the natural world, their obsession with death, and the religious symbolism that characterized every aspect of legionary public life. Legionaries sang about highly emotional themes, and made frequent use of the imperative tense in their songs. Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison argue that in many social movements, “collective structures of feeling are actually made and reorganized … through song.” By claiming that their music expressed the Romanian soul, legionaries hoped to transform spectators into sympathizers and incorporate them into an imagined national community that Legionaries claimed to be appealing to a peasant base, and yet even though early legionary songs celebrated peasant life, they rarely reproduced peasant musical forms. Music, more than many forms of culture, often reflects class distinctions very clearly through both song structure and lyrical content, so how did legionaries use music to attract peasants? Songs expressed the Legion’s mythology, they created its style, and they provided the basis for its convivial sociability. In this paper, I situate legionary songs within the group’s wider semiotic web, suggest why certain musical styles were preferred over others, and show how legionaries used song to form solidarities with diverse sections of the population. Roland Clark is a a doctoral student in History at the University of Pittsburgh.

Each week, an interview is published as part of the 45 for 45 series, which will run throughout 2018 to mark the 45th anniversary of the Society for Romanian Studies as well as the 100th anniversary of the formation of modern Romania. You might want to check the latest interviews, available at: https://srstudies.org/activities-programs/45-for-45/.

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The Society for Romanian Studies

Announces:

The Fourth Biennial SRS Book Prize

The committee agreed unanimously to award the prize to Roland Clark, Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Cornell UP, 2015). Clark’s book offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of the interwar Legionary movement from the perspective of the history of everyday social life. Moving away from abstract paradigms of ‘the nature of Romanian fascism’, Clark tells us more about what the Legionaries actually did (and did not) do, using a large number of new archival sources. His book covers the career of the movement from beginning to end and treats a remarkable range of topics, with a good structure, contextualization, regional coverage, and comparison with other fascist movements. Especially impressive is the way Clark situates interwar Romanian political phenomena in the context of broader paradigms of international social, cultural, political and religious history; and brings the topic up to date with a closing reflection on the memory of Legionary activity in post-war and present-day Romanian society. For the breadth and depth of its analysis, its rich documentation and clear writing style, Clark’s work stands out against a very strong field.

There were also three important Honorable Mentions:

Virginia Hill and Gabriela Alboiu, Verb Movement and Clause Structure in Old Romanian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) show that although early Romanian texts display predominantly Latin and Romance morphology patterns, they also signal a strong manifestation of the Balkan Sprachbund where syntax is concerned. These findings help us to understand more clearly the linguistic processes that paved the way for the emergence of modern Romanian.

Dennis Deletant, British Clandestine Activities in Romania During the Second World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) contains priceless and rare information concerning Britain’s wartime role in Romania, that by its nature is hard to access. Deletant not only clarifies the documentary record of a contested story but offers careful and calibrated assessments of the ultimate impact of British activities, as well as providing insights from Romanian archives that have not hitherto been available to British researchers.

Ştefan Ionescu, Jewish Resistance to Romanianization (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) greatly enriches our understanding of Jewish resistance to the Antonescu regime during the Second World War. Focusing on the Jewish community of Bucharest, Ionescu defines his topic as ‘an asynchronic duel fought with legal weapons in an asymmetric warfare’. His fine analysis, based on extensive archival research, adds to our knowledge both of the Jewish community’s plight and activities, and of their impact on the social and political history of wartime Romania as a whole.

SRS Book Prize Committee Members: 

About the SRS Book Prize:

For details of the Prize and past winners please see: https://srstudies.org/2016/06/18/awards-prizes/

〉President

Roland Clark

History Department, University of Liverpool, 11 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7WZ, United Kingdom, +44 (0)151 794 9526, Roland.Clark@liverpool.ac.uk

〉Vice-President

Rodica Milena Zaharia

Centrului de Cercetare in Relatii Economice Internaționale, Academia de Studii Economice, Piata Romana, Nr. 6, Sala 1212, Bucuresti, Romania, +40 (0)21 319 1901, milena_zaharia@yahoo.com

〉Past President

Lavinia Stan

Department of Political Science, St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, B2G 2W5, Canada, +1 (902) 867-5084, lstan@stfx.ca

〉Treasurer

Past Treasurer: Roxana Cazan, Saint Francis University, rcazan@francis.edu

Current Treasurer: Vladimir Solonari, Department of History, University of Central Florida, Orlando, Fl 32816-1350, USA, Vladimir.Solonari@ucf.edu

〉Secretary

Anca Sincan

‘Hidden Galleries’ European Research Council Project, University College Cork, Room 3.37, T12 ND89, Ireland, anca.sincan@ucc.ie

〉Newsletter Editor

Leah Valtin-Erwin

Indiana University, Bloomington, Department of History

lvaltin@iu.edu

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. The SRS is recognized as the major North American professional organization for scholars concerned with Romania, Moldova, and their diasporas.

SRS is affiliated with the South East European Studies Association (SEESA); the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES); the American Political Science Association (APSA); the American Historical Association (AHA); and the Romanian Studies Association of America (RSAA).

SRS offers a number of programs and activities to its members, including the peer-reviewed Journal of Romanian Studies, a biannual newsletter, the Romanian Studies book series published in collaboration with the publishing house Polirom in Iaşi, a mentoring program, prizes for exceptional scholarship in two different categories, as well as an international conference organized every three years in Romania.