Research team

Anca Pârvulescu (Project Leader)

Liselotte Dieckmann Professor in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis

Anca Parvulescu’s research and teaching interests include global modernism, literary and critical theory, literary comparatism, migration studies, and East Europe.

Anca Parvulescu is the author of three books: Laughter: Notes on a Passion (MIT Press, 2010); The Traffic in Women’s Work: East European Migration and the Making of Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2014); and, with Manuela Boatcă, Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell University Press, 2022). Parvulescu’s articles have been published in PMLA, New Literary History, Critical Inquiry, Literature Compass, Interventions, Camera Obscura. Her work has been funded by the ACLS, the Huntington Library, the American Councils for International Education, the McDonnell Academy, and the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St Louis. She has received the Outstanding Mentor Award and the Miriam Bailin Prize for Teaching.

Christian Moraru

Christian Moraru is Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He specializes in contemporary American fiction, critical theory, and comparative literature with emphasis on international postmodernism and its post-Cold War developments and successors, as well as on the relations between globalism and culture across several national traditions in the modern era. His recent publications include monographs such as Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (University of Michigan Press, 2011), Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology (University of Michigan Press, 2015), and Flat Aesthetics: Twenty-First-Century American Fiction and the Making of the Contemporary (Bloomsbury, 2023). He is the editor of Postcommunism, Postmodernism, and the Global Imagination (Columbia University Press / EEM Series, 2009) and the coeditor of The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century (Northwestern University Press, 2015), Romanian Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2018), and The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory (Bloomsbury, 2022).

Mihaela Ursa

Mihaela Ursa is Professor of comparative literature and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Letters, Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca. Editor-in-chief of Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory. Authored seven books in Romanian language on comparatism, critical theory, fictionality, gender studies, and erotic literature (latest – Identitate şi excentricitate: Comparatismul românesc între specific local şi globalizare [Identity and Ex-Centricity: Romanian Comparatism between Local and Global], 2013). Co-author of several collective volumes and of hundreds of articles, studies, reviews, essays published on cultural studies, literary theory and criticism, both as a cultural journalist and as an academic researcher. Among the latest: „Made in Translation: A National Poetics for the Transnational World” for Romanian Literature as World Literature, edited by M. Martin, Chr. Moraru, A. Terian, Bloomsbury, 2018; „Non-human Displacements: Narrative Remediations of Autobiography and Postmemory in Herta Müller’s Writing” for Women’s Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by S. Mitroiu, Palgrave, 2018.

Levente Szabó

T. Szabó Levente (1977) is an Associate Professor of Hungarian and Comparative Literary Studies, director of the Doctoral School of Hungarian Studies at Babeș-Bolyai University. Author of serveral successful and award-winning books and articles on classical Hungarian literature, the beginnings of Hungarian modernism and the social history of nineteenth-century literary nation-building, he is specialized in the social history and political economy of classical Hungarian literature, literary sociology and the history of early comparative literature. Major publications include: Mikszáth, a kételkedő modern. Történelmi és társadalmi reprezentációk Mikszáth Kálmán prózapoétikájában [Mikszáth, the Sceptic Modern. Representing the Historical and the Social in the Prose of Kálmán Mikszáth], L’Harmattan–Magyar Irodalomtörténeti Társaság, Budapest, 2007.; A tér képei: tér, irodalom, társadalom [Constructing the National Space in Nineteenth-Century Hungarian Literary Nation-Building], KOMP-PRESS, Kolozsvár, 2008.; Narrating ’the People’ and ’Disciplining’ the Folk: the Constitution of the Hungarian Ethnographic Discipline and the Touristic Movements (1880-1900), Center for Advanced Study, Sofia, 2011. (CAS Working Paper Series 3/2011).

Alex Goldiș

Alex Goldiș is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. He is a founder and chief co-editor of Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory. He was the director of the grant The Role of the Translated Novel in the Romanian Literary System. A Quantitative Approach (2020-2022). He authored the volumes Critica în tranșee. De la realismul socialist la autonomia esteticului [Criticism in the Trenches. From Socialist Realism to the Autonomy of the Aesthetic] (Cartea Românească, București, 2011), Sincronizarea criticii românești postbelice în deceniile opt și nouă – teorii, metode, critici [The Synchronization of Postwar Romanian Criticism in the 1970s and 1980s – Theories, Methods, Critics] (Muzeul Literaturii Române, București, 2013), and, as co-editor with Ștefan Baghiu, the volume Translations and Semi-peripheral Cultures. Worlding the Romanian Novel in the Modern Literary System (Peter Lang Publishing, Berlin,2022). He published several studies in collective volumes and academic journals, among which „Between Transnationalism and Nation Building: Literary History as Geolocation”, in M. Martin, C. Moraru, A. Terian, Romanian Literature as World Literature, New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

Cosmin Borza

Cosmin Borza works as a Researcher at the ”Sextil Pușcariu” Institute of Linguistics and Literary History, Romanian Academy, Cluj-Napoca. He authored two books of literary criticism (Marin Sorescu. Singur printre canonici [Marin Sorescu. Alone among Canonical Writers] – 2014, and Dezbaterea canonică astăzi. Cazul literaturii române postbelice [The Canonical Debate Today. The Case of Postwar Romanian Literature] – 2016). He also contributed to important lexicographic projects of the Romanian Academy, the volumes Dicționarul general al literaturii române [The General Dictionary of Romanian Literature], second edition (2016-2021), and Dicționarul cronologic al romanului românesc de la origini până în 2000 [The Chronological Dictionary of the Romanian Novel from Origins to 2000], revised and abridged (2023). His main areas of research are: the rural novel, the subgenres of the Romanian novels, the relations between literature and ideology, postcommunist literature. Among his recent articles are (with Daiana Gârdan and Emanuel Modoc) The Peasant and the Nation Plot: A Distant Reading of the Romanian Rural Novel from the First Half of the Twentieth Century, in “Rural History: Economy, Society, Culture”, vol. 34, no. 1, 2023: 75–91; “Post-canonicity: Curating World Literary Archives after Postmodernism”, in Theory in the “Post” Era: A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021): 303–321.

Emanuel Modoc

Emanuel Modoc is Assistant Professor at the Babeș-Bolyai University, Faculty of Letters. He obtained his PhD at the Department of Comparative and Universal Literature within the Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, with a thesis on the networks of East-Central European avant-gardes. He is an Assistant Editor for the “Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory” and a Research Assistant at the “Sextil Pușcariu” Institute of Linguistics and Literary History”, part of the Cluj-Napoca Branch of the Romanian Academy. He authored the volume Internaționala periferiilor. Rețeaua avangardelor din Europa Centrală și de Est/ The International of Peripheries. Avant-Garde Networks of East-Central Europe (Muzeul Literaturii Române, 2020) and edited the writings of Surrealist poet Paul Păun (Muzeul Literaturii Române, 2020).

Mircea Minică

Mircea Minică is a lexicographer at the Institute of Linguistics and Literary History “Sextil Pușcariu” of the Romanian Academy – Cluj-Napoca Branch. He published Semantica relației în limba română (2018) and a series of articles on lexicography and the grammar of Romanian. He is co-author of: Dicționarul limbii române (DLR), letters L (2008), J, K, Q (2010); Școala Ardeleană (2018, coord. E. Pavel), and contributed to: Dicționarul etimologic al limbii române (DELR), vol. I. A-B (2011). Areas of interest: relational semantics, lexicography, philosophy of language.

Luiza Medeleanu

Luiza Medeleanu graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy and the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, the Rromani-English section, a Master’s in Philosophy at the University of Bucharest and one in Anthropology at SNSPA. He is currently pursuing an European Ph.D in Cultural Studies at the Center for Excellence in Image Studies (CESI), Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest, in collaboration with the Central European University (CEU) and L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales ( EHESS), Paris. Her doctoral thesis deals with the image of Roma in soap operas. He is an associate university assistant at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest, Rromani section, where he teaches Romani Culture and Literature, and an educational expert at the Roma Education Fund, where he develops intercultural activities for students, parents and teachers.