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Prizes
SRS awards three prizes: the annual Graduate Student Essay Prize, the biennial Book Award, and the biennial Keith Hitchins Dissertation Prize.
Winners
2023 Book Prize
Winner:
Svetlana Suveica, Post-Imperial Encounters: Transnational Designs of Bessarabia in Paris and Elsewhere 1917-1922 (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022).
Honourable Mentions:
Constanța Vintilă, Changing Subjects, Moving Objects: Status, Mobility, and Social Transformation in Southeastern Europe, 1700-1850 (Brill Schöningh 2022).
Grant T. Harward’s Romania’s Holy War: Soldiers, Motivation, and the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2021).
2023 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Ecaterina Vlad, MA, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Honorable Mention: Emőke Gondos, MA, Central European University
2022 Keith Hitchins Dissertation Prize
Co-winners: Cosmin Koszor-Codrea (Oxford Brookes University) and Rucsandra Pop (Bucharest University)
2022 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Leah Valtin-Erwin (Indiana University Bloomington)
Honorable Mention: Irina Nicorici (Rutgers University)
Winner: Roxana-Talida Roman, The Edge of Europe – Heritage, Landscape and Conflict Archaeology: First World War Material Culture in Romanian Conflictual Landscapes (Oxford: Bar Publishing, 2020).
Honorable Mentions: Péter Berta, Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity among Romanian Roma (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019), and Călin Cotoi, Inventing the Social in Romania, 1848–1914: Networks and Laboratories of Knowledge (Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Schoeningh, 2020).
2021 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Alexandra Ciocănel (University of Manchester)
Honorable Mention: Iemima Ploscariu (Dublin City University)
2020 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Cosmin Koszor Codrea (Oxford Brookes University)
Honorable Mention: Cosmin Tudor Minea (University of Birmingham)
Winner: Bruce O’Neill, The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order (Duke University Press, 2017).
Honorable Mention: Irina Marin, Peasant Violence and Antisemitism in Early Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
2019 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Adela Hîncu (Central European University)
Honorable Mention: Elena Radu
2018 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Alexandra Chiriac (University of St. Andrews)
Honorable Mentions: Nicoleta Simonia Minciu, Iemima Ploscariu (Dublin City University), and Matthew Signer (Stanford University)
Winner: Roland Clark, Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Cornell University Press, 2015).
Honorable Mentions: Virginia Hill and Gabriela Alboiu, Verb Movement and Clause Structure in Old Romanian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), Dennis Deletant, British Clandestine Activities in Romania During the Second World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and Ştefan Ionescu, Jewish Resistance to Romanianization (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
2017 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Dana Mureşan
Special Mentions: Kathryn Grow Allen (University of Buffalo), Alin Rus (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Karin Steinbrueck (Northwestern University)
2016 Graduate Student Essay Prize
No prize awarded.
Winner: Sean Cotter, Literary Translation and the Idea of a Minor Romania (Rochester, 2014).
Honorable Mention: Moshe Idel, Mircea Eliade: From Magic to Myth (Peter Lang, 2013).
2015 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Matei Costinescu (University of Bucharest)
Honorable Mentions: Madalina Vereş (University of Pittsburgh) and Zsuzsanna Magdo (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
2014 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Roxana Cazan (Indiana University, Bloomington)
Winner: Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery, Peasants under Siege: the Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949-1962 (Princeton University Press, 2011).
2013 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Florin Poenaru (Central European University)
2012 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Jonathan Stillo (City University of New York)
Winner: Tom Gallagher, Romania and the European Union: How the Weak Vanquished the Strong (Manchester University Press, 2009)
2011 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Cristina Onose (University of Toronto)
2010 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Anca Mandru (University of Illinois)
2009 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Roland Clark (University of Pittsburgh)
Mentoring Program
The Society for Romanian Studies is launching a new mentoring program that pairs scholars at different stages of their careers or in different parts of the world to facilitate mutually beneficial discussions and communication. Junior scholars gain local information formally from their supervisors and informally from others they come into contact with. Informal mentorship is particularly important for students and scholars working in the West whose primary supervisors are not themselves specialists in Romania and Moldova. Similarly, students and scholars based in Eastern Europe will find it beneficial to establish informal relationships with their colleagues abroad, with whom they can discuss disciplinary trends and other questions of mutual interest. Mentoring also benefits senior scholars by helping them stay abreast of new literatures and trends in the field as well as providing insights into other universities and other countries.
The purpose of the SRS Mentoring Program is to provide SRS members with invaluable support and established scholars the opportunity to help shape the future of the field and support new research. Responsibility for making the mentoring relationship work rests with the individual mentor/mentee, but the SRS acts as a sponsoring organization that matches mentors and mentees and suggests parameters for the relationship. The SRS aims at facilitating formal mentoring initiatives in cases where mentors and mentees do not know each other, have no clear understanding of their current expertise areas, and need help to connect.
Mentoring relationships may either be established around specific, short-term goals, such as writing a book proposal or developing strategies for acceptance into graduate schools, or may involve a series of discussions career trajectories, publication plans, accessing libraries, archives, or fellowships, or other issues of mutual interest to the mentor and mentee. Individual pairs should agree on the nature and longevity of the commitment, but we envisage that most mentoring relationships will involve several informal conversations over a period of six months.
If you are willing to consider becoming a mentor, could you please fill out a short form here. Your bio (but not your contact details) will then be available online for potential mentees.
For further details please contact Roland Clark (clarkr@liv.ac.uk) or any of the other members of the Mentoring Committee:
Margaret Beissinger (mhbeissi@princeton.edu)
Petru Negură (petru.negura@gmail.com)
Robert Ives (rives@unr.edu)
Cristina Plămădeală (montrealcp@gmail.com)
Anca Şincan (anca.sincan@gmail.com)
SRS Newsletter
The Society for Romanian Studies publishes a regular, semi-annual, newsletter to keep its members and associates informed of goings on in the field. The newsletter is distributed in electronic form only. Subscribers to H-Romania and our Facebook friends are notified once a new issue is published, usually in November and April each year.
Please send news of your publications, moves, graduations, advancement, conferences, and life events to the Newsletter editorial team:
- Anna Batzeli, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece (abatzeli@he.duth.gr)
- Ruxandra-Iuliana Canache, Postdoc I.C.U.B. (ruxu.rp@gmail.com)
- Bronwyn Cragg, Independent scholar (bronwyn.cragg@gmail.com)
To read current and past issues of the SRS Newsletter in PDF format, please click on the links below:
Conferences
SRS is committed to organizing thematic international conferences in Europe every 3 years. See the links before for information on past and future conferences.
What we do
The Society for Romanian Studies is involved in a variety of activities and programs, and you can too. We offer two prizes, publish a book series in collaboration with Polirom as well as the Journal of Romanian Studies in collaboration with Ibidem Press, maintain a mentorship program, distribute our biannual Newsletter, maintain links with a number of other scholarly organizations, and organize an international conference in Romania every three years. The Society celebrated its 45th anniversary in 2018, a momentous event we marked with the “45 for 45” interviews series published in the acclaimed LaPunkt.
Please choose one of the links below to find out more!
SRS 2017 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Committee:
R. Chris Davis
(Lone Star College-Kingwood),
Valentina Glajar
(Texas State University),
Ron King
(San Diego State University),
Diane Vancea
(Ovidius University of Constanta)
The Ninth Annual SRS Graduate Student Essay Prize is awarded to the most outstanding unpublished essay or thesis chapter written in English by a graduate student in any social science or humanities discipline on a Romanian subject during the long academic year 2016–17. The prize committee received over twenty essays from a wide range of disciplines, submitted by graduate students and recent graduates from across North America, Europe, and Asia. The committee debated the merits of many prize-worthy essays. In the end, one essay stood above the others. It is with great pleasure that the committee awards this year’s Graduate Student Essay Prize to Dana Muresan for her essay “Brancusi: The Construction of a Romanian National Hero.”
Muresan’s well-researched and highly sophisticated essay examines through the lens of Brancusi the complex relationship of art and nationalism. It explores the role of Romania in the formation of Brancusi’s universal modern art and, in turn, the role of Brancusi and his art in the formation of Romanian identity and promotion of national culture. In particular, Muresan addresses the value the Romanian state derived from claiming Bransuci as a national hero, as a cultural symbol combining historic identity and contemporary sophistication. Yet this appropriation explicitly could not include full appreciation for the content of the work, given that Brancusi the émigré was producing art that was distinctly non-socialist in theme and format. The paper beautifully explores this contradiction, especially as it played out in official Romanian artistic discourse, highlighting both statements and silences of that official discourse. All at once, Muresan reflects on the legacy of Brancusi’s biography and art in both Romania and Paris; widens the analytical frame of Romanian identity discourses; and makes a significant contribution to an array of scholarly fields, including nationalism studies, identity studies, and art history, among others. Equally important to the committee, the essay showcases the field of Romanian Studies in an international context. Finally, Muresan achieves something very rare in academic writing these days, namely the ability to communicate ideas to specialists and non-specialists alike.
The committee felt three other finalists from this year’s competition deserved special mention: Kathryn Grow Allen’s “Migration, Conversion and the Creation of an Identity in Southeast Europe: A Biological Distance and Strontium Isotope Analysis of Ottoman Communities in Romania, Hungary and Croatia”; Alin Rus’s “‘Building’ Cultural Patrimony in Ceaușescu’s Neopatrimonial Romania”; and Karin Steinbrueck’s “Aftershocks: Nicolae Ceaușescu and the Romanian Communist Regime’s Responses to the 1977 Earthquake.” The quality and diversity of this year’s submissions certainly bodes well for the future of Romanian studies.
SRS Email Listserv
We want to encourage you to start using H-Romania exclusively. Please begin to migrate to H-Romania. In the meantime, we will keep this page to provide a smooth transition, but it will not remain forever.
You are invited to join the News from the Society for Romanian Studies E-mail List, which is made available through Google Groups. Anyone who is interested, SRS member or not, may subscribe to the list. The SRS List is used to send out news, information, or other notices in a more timely fashion between issues of the Newsletter. This might include conference announcements, calls for papers, funding information, etc.
If you have problems subscribing or unsubscribing to the list through Google Groups, please contact the SRS webmaster at webmaster@srstudies.org.
H-Romania
H-Romania is an international interdisciplinary academic forum promoting the professional study, criticism, and research of all aspects of Romanian history, politics, culture and society. It focuses primarily on the countries of Romania and Moldova but also attends to numerous other past and present political, ethnic and social groups, including minorities and diasporas, in terms of their significant connections to present-day Romanian territory. Its intended audience is scholars, professionals, and students who study, teach, and write about Romania, Moldova, and these countries’ cultures and diasporas. Since 2013, it has been affiliated with the Society for Romanian Studies (SRS), generally recognized as the major international professional organization for scholars concerned with Romania and Moldova. H-Romania’s editorial rationale is to facilitate the exchange of news, resources, and ideas about Romanian Studies. Specifically, it endeavors to create and strengthen scholarly and professional networks; to commission reviews and other scholarly discussions and debates on historical and contemporary issues important to Romania; to share ideas about teaching and researching; and more broadly to promote activities designed to foster advancement in these fields. H-Romania is currently edited by R. Chris Davis and Valentin Săndulescu.
How to Join H-Romania
To join H-Romania, first set up an H-Net account. To do so, go to https://networks.h-net.org, click on “Sign up to subscribe & contribute,” and follow the instructions there. Once you’ve created an H-Net account and profile, you can then go to the H-Romania page and click “Subscribe to this network to join the discussion.” Before allowing any contributions, we ask that you complete your H-Net profile, indicating your institutional affiliation, degrees, and areas of interest. You can do this by clicking on the accounts icon in the upper right, then selecting the “Profile” option from the drop-down menu.
How to Contact the Editors
We are interested in building our Reviews and Reports pages, including book and film reviews as well as conference and exhibition reports. If you have any questions please feel free to contact the editors at editorial-romania@mail.h-net.msu.edu. Please also let us know if you are interested in joining the editorial team or becoming a reviewer or blogger at H-Romania. Thanks, and please spread the word to colleagues and students!!
Organizational Links
The Society for Romanian Studies maintains close ties with a number of other scholarly organizations. Chief among them is the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), which every November organizes an annual meeting that is well attended by SRS members.
The other organizations with which the SRS maintains links are listed below, together with the SRS liaisons:
- The American Historical Association (AHA) is the oldest and largest society of historians in the United States. It organizes an annual conference in January, in which many SRS members participate. The SRS participates with one panel organized by Ruxandra Petrinca. More information is available at: http://www.historians.org.
SRS liaison: Ruxandra Petrinca (McGill University, ruxandra.petrinca@mail.mcgill.ca)
- The American Political Science Association (APSA) is the largest organization of political scientists in the United States. Each year, the APSA organizes a conference in late August. The SRS participates with one panel organized by Dr. Claudiu Tufiş. The APSA website is: http://www.apsanet.org.
SRS liaison: Claudiu Tufiş (University of Bucharest, claudiu.tufis@fspub.unibuc.ro)
- The Romanian Studies Association of America (RSAA) focuses on Romanian language and literature. Each year since its creation, the RSAA has organized two sessions at the annual Modern Language Association (MLA) convention, which takes place in January. More information on the RSAA is available at: http://www.thersaa.org. The SRS and RSAA offer a joint membership.
SRS liaison: Margaret Beissinger (Princeton University, mhbeissi@princeton.edu) - The Southeast European Studies Association (SEESA) is devoted to the exchange of knowledge amongst scholars interested in the area of Southeastern Europe. Many of its members are working on Romania and Moldova. Its website is: http://www.seesa.info/conferences. The SRS and SEESA offer a joint membership.
SRS liaison: Dallas Michelbacher (Central Michigan University, miche1df@cmich.edu) - The Balkan History Association (BHA) is a non-profit, apolitical, and independent organization that aims to develop and promote at both national and international levels the interdisciplinary and comparative study of the Balkan region, and, more generally, of South-East Europe, located in Bucharest, Romania. The BHA website is: https://www.balkan-history.com/
SRS liaison: Roland Clark (University of Liverpool, clarkr@liv.ac.uk)
- The PLURAL Forum for Interdisciplinary Studies is a not-for-profit organisation based in the Republic of Moldova. It aims at initiating and carrying out analyses and discussions of phenomena and social issues neglected or distorted in the public space, such as inequality, oppression, identities, cultures, power and ideologies. It’s website is http://plural.md/ SRS liaison: Petru Negură (Free International University from Moldova, Chişinău, petru.negura@gmail.com).
- The American Romanian Coalition for Human and Equal Rights (ARCHER) formed in 2020 “to empower the members of diaspora to become active supporters and advocates of social justice and human rights in our communities.” For more information see https://archercoalition.org/ SRS liaison: Roxana Cazan (roxanalcazan@gmail.com)
- The Immigration Research Forum (IRF) is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization established in Washington, DC dedicated to the research of transatlantic immigration, the social integration of immigrants and their impact on host communities and countries of origin. It seeks to bring together professionals with different areas of research expertise, to help develop, promote and sustain strategies of empowering vulnerable populations, including immigrant groups through lobby and public diplomacy efforts. For more information see https://www.immigrationresearchforum.org/ SRS liaison: Teodor Stan (info@immigrationresearchforum.org)
- The New Books Network (NBN) is a consortium of author-interview podcast channels dedicated to raising the level of public discourse by introducing scholars and other serious writers to a wide public via new media. Covering 100+ subjects, disciplines, and genres, we publish 50 to 75 episodes every week. The NBN reaches about a million people every month; NBN listeners download close to 5 million episodes a month. SRS liaison: Roland Clark (clarkr@liverpool.ac.uk)
Noua Colecție Editorială
Society for Romanian Studies (SRS), cea mai importantă organizație academică internațională dedicată dezvoltării și promovării studiilor românești, și Polirom, cea mai puternică editură de pe piața academică românească, au încheiat un parteneriat cu scopul de a lansa o nouă colecție editorială, Studii Româneşti/Romanian Studies/Études Roumaines/Rumänische Studien. Colecția va cuprinde cărți în limba română, scrise sau coordonate de către membrii SRS.
În momentul de față acceptăm trei tipuri de manuscrise:
- Traduceri în limba română ale unor studii monografice deja publicate într-o limbă străină
- Studii monografice inedite, scrise în limba română
- Volume colective de studii care tratează o temă unitară, scrise în limba română
Volumele propuse pentru publicare în cadrul colecției trebuie să aibă un caracter preponderent academic și să se ocupe de România și/sau de Republica Moldova, de comunitățile care trăiesc pe teritoriile acestor țări, de culturile lor sau de diaspora românească și moldovenească. Contribuțiile pot să adopte o perspectivă disciplinară, interdisciplinară sau multidisciplinară și să vizeze domenii precum istoria, științele politice, sociologia, antropologia, dreptul, economia, lingvistica, literatura, istoria artei și altele. Toate manuscrisele și cărțile vor fi recenzate atent în vederea publicării.
Mai multe informații privind procedura de trimitere a propunerilor de volume sunt disponibile pe site-ul SRS, la adresa http://www.srstudies.org/book-series/.
Pentru întrebări și sugestii, vă rugăm să-i contactați pe coordonatoarele colecției, pe consultant sau pe membrii consiliului consultativ.