Author: TransCorr

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Andrei SORESCU is an early career researcher (PhD UCL SSEES ’19) specializing in nineteenth-century European intellectual and cultural history, with an emphasis on Romania in a transnational setting. He has published on the history of concepts, the intellectual history of international law, the impact of subversive objects on nation-building, and on antisemitism and citizenship. He has previously held postdoctoral positions at the New Europe College institute of advanced studies, Bucharest, and at the University of Bucharest Research Institute (ICUB).

At present, he is a member of two research projects covering the long nineteenth century, funded by UEFISCDI (the Romanian higher education funding agency) at the New Europe College, examining the entanglement between colonialism, infrastructure, and corruption – and the cultural and social impact of the Danubian quarantine system, respectively.

Email: [email protected]

Selected Publications:
Forthcoming:
“The ‘Is’ at Home, the ‘Ought’ Abroad: Self-Comparison as Self-Criticism and the Transylvanian Model in Early Twentieth Century Romania”, Comparative Studies in Society and History (peer-reviewed article, in press)

“The Numbers Game: Demographic Anxieties and Quotas in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Romania and the Global Anti-Semitic Imaginary” in: Michael Laurence Miller, Judith Szapor (eds.) Quotas: “The Jewish Question” and Higher Education in Central Europe and Beyond (1880-1945), Berghahn, 2024 (w. Raul Cârstocea, chapter in volume, in press)

Recent:
“Inventing a Prosthetic Bourgeoisie: Romania and the Aromanians, 1848-1906” Nations and Nationalism, 4/2022, pp. 661-683 (peer-reviewed article)

“Peddlers, Peasants, Icons, Engravings: The Portrait of the Tsar and Romanian Nation-Building, 1888-1916” New Europe College Ştefan Odobleja Program Yearbook 2019-2020, pp. 209-246 (chapter in volume) OA: https://nec.ro/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Sorescu.pdf

„Denunţarea „funcţionarismului” şi a clientelismului în Vechiul Regat” [“Denouncing ‘functionarism’ and Clientelism in the ‘Old Kingdom’ of Romania”] (w. Silvia Marton), in: Judit Pál, Vlad Popovici, Andrei Florin Sora (coord.), Servitorii Statului: Funcționari, funcții și funcționarism în România modernă (1830-1948), Cluj-Napoca, Mega, 2022, pp. 75-105 (chapter in volume)

“Política «oculta»: Publicidad, secretismo, transparencia e inteligibilidad en la Rumanía de finales del siglo XIX” [“‘Occult’ Politics: Publicity, Secrecy, Transparency, and Intelligibility in Late Nineteenth Century Romania”] (w. Silvia Marton), in: Frédéric Monier, Lluís Ferran Toledano, Joan Pubill, Gemma Rubí (eds.), “Las sombras de la transparencia. Secreto, corrupción y “Estado profundo” en la Europa contemporánea”, Editorial Comares, 2022, p.
21-43 (chapter in volume)

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Constanţa VINTILĂ is a Senior Researcher in the Department of Modern History at the ‘Nicolae Iorga’ Institute of History, Romanian Academy. She received her PhD in History et Civilisation, from EHESS, Paris (2004) and in Sociology from University of Bucharest (2012). She was the recipient of the ERC Consolidator Research Grant entitled Luxury, Fashion and Social Status in the Early Modern South-Eastern Europe, hosted by New Europe College, Institute for Advanced Study, Bucharest (2015-2020). She was researcher, visiting professor, or guest lecturer at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) (2002, 2003, 2007), Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (Paris) (2007), University of Toulouse (2008), University Paris-Sorbonne IV (Centre Roland Mousnier) (2012, 2015), Freie Universität Berlin (2016), University of Amsterdam (2017), University of Munster (2017). She was a research fellow of the New Europe College – Institute for Advanced Studies, Bucharest (2001-2002, 2006-2007, 2020-21), and fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2015-2016); postdoctoral fellow of Agence universitaire de la francophonie at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) (2004-2005). Since 2009, she co-organizes (with Silvia Marton and Constantin Ardeleanu) the monthly focus-group “Political and Social History of the 18th and 19th century” within the New Europe College – Institute for Advanced Studies, Bucharest.

Constanţa Vintilă is a social historian who dedicates her research to the history of family, mobility, and material culture in pre-modern and modern South-eastern Europe. She started her career studying the history of family in the eighteenth-century Romanian society. Her scholarship has made important contributions to the history of the family in South-eastern Europe by exploring and analysing a huge number of primary archives kept by the ecclesiastical and civil courts in Wallachia and Moldavia. Her international scientific visibility has increased after receiving an ERC Consolidator Grant. In the framework of the ERC project LuxFass, she focused on luxury and social status, and material culture across South-eastern Europe.

In TransCorr, Constanţa Vintilă investigates the Phanariot networks across the empires of Central-South-eastern Europe. She will build a series of micro-historical case-studies of patron-client tiesto understand the vocabulary used to describe such long-standing connections and networks, their typology, and their aims. She will also study how the historical actors mobilized these networks in various situations, locations, and periods.

Selected publications:
Changing Subjects, Moving Objects. Status, Mobility, and Social Transformation in Southeastern Europe, 1700-1850, Brill, Leiden, 2022. Changing Subjects, Moving Objects – Status, Mobility, and Social Transformation in Southeastern Europe, 1700–1850 | Brill

Women, Consumption, and the Circulation of Ideas in South-Eastern Europe, 17th – 19th Centuries, Brill, Leiden, 2018 (ed. by). Women, Consumption, and the Circulation of Ideas in South-Eastern Europe, 17th – 19th Centuries | Brill

‘Du zarif au galant. Modes et corps à l’âge des révolutions dans les pays roumains (1780-1830)’. Annales Historique de la Révolution Française, 3 (49) 2022, 145-168.

‘Shawls and Sable Furs: How to Be a Boyar under the Phanariot Regime (1710-1821)’, European History Yearbook, 20 (2019), 137-158.

‘I believe in stories’: The journey of a young boyar from Bucharest to Istanbul in the early nineteenth century’, Turcica, (50) 2019, 285-317.

‘A Wallachian Boyar in Emperor Joseph II’s Court’, Journal of Early Modern History, 2019, 341-362.

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A transnational historian of modern Europe, Alex TIPEI is an assistant professor in the department of history and the program in international studies at the University of Montréal. She trained in the United States and France and earned her PhD from Indiana University (2016). She has previously held teaching or research positions at McGill and Princeton Universities as well as the Universities of Bucharest and Illinois. Focused primarily on Southeastern Europe and France in a global context, her research questions fundamental dichotomies—center/periphery, universal/national, developed backward, local/global—and reveal how relations between these categories are not as
straightforward as they appear.

Alex’s first monograph, Unintended Nations: How French Liberals’ Empire of Civilization Remade Southeast Europe and the Post-Napoleonic World, is currently under review at Oxford University Press. Based on archival work in France, Romania, and Greece, the book explores how and why, after Napoleon’s defeat, Paris-based liberals formed partnerships with Orthodox elites in Southeast Europe. They used a specific discourse of civilization to describe and promote these relationships, which aimed to produce informal economic and cultural colonies in the Balkans. The study reveals the central place of these exchanges in the development of liberalism and of a liberal reform agenda in France. It likewise demonstrates how these contacts provided a framework for the articulation of nascent national identities in the Greek and the Romanian lands. Situating this history in a global context, it links these entanglements to Franco-British economic competition in the Americas and discuss how they helped crystalize the cultural, political, and biopolitical borders of Europe and the West.

Alex has published in outlets such as Modern Intellectual History, European History Quarterly, and has an article forthcoming in East European Politics and Society. She is presently working on a second monograph that traces out the role of French Saint-Simonians in the expansion of infrastructure and finance networks in Greece and Mexico. Her recent work has benefited from support from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fulbright Program among other sources.

As a member of the TransCorr team, Alex looks forward to further studying the relationship between the development of (West European) modernity and the rise of specific notions of corruption in Southeast Europe as well as the way actors in the Balkans and their partners across the continent mobilized these concepts to further their discrete political and economic agendas. Alex has previously touched on this topic, contributing, for instance, the chapter, “A Corrupt Governor? Kapodistrias’s Assassination in the Francophone Press” to a new collective volume on the Greek War of Independence (ed. by Christine Phillou and Katerina Lagos, under review at Oxford University Press).

Email: [email protected]

Selected Publications:
Unintended Nations: How French Liberals’ Empire of Civilization Remade Southeast Europe and the Post-Napoleonic World, under review Oxford University Press.

“‘And Mama Studied with Me’: Elementary Education, Modernization, Gendered Curricula, and the Reconfiguration of the Public and Private in the Danubian Principalities and Greek lands, 1810s-1840s,” East European Politics & Societies, forthcoming.

“Korais’s Greece and Napoleon’s Empire: The Egyptian Campaign, Race Science, and the Europeanization of an Idea,” in From the Napoleonic Age to the Age of Empires: Empire after the Emperor, Thomas Dodman & Aurélien Lignereux (eds.), (Palgrave, 2023).

“How to Make Friends & Influence People: Elementary Education, French ‘Influence,’ & the Balkans, 1815-40s” Modern Intellectual History, 15:3 (Nov., 2018): 621-649. “Audience Matters: ‘Civilization-Speak,’ Educational Discourses, & Balkan Nationalism, 1815-40,” European History Quarterly, 48:4 (Fall, 2018): 658-685.

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Judit PÁL, PhD, is a Historian, professor at Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj (Romania), Faculty of History and Philosophy, and in the framework of the grant “Social mobility of elites in the Central European regions (1861-1926) and transition of imperial experience and structures in nation-states” (EXPRO 2020 No. 20-19463X) researcher at Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Prague). She specializes in elite research, social and political history of the Habsburg Monarchy, with particular emphasis on the history of 18th and 19th century Hungary and Transylvania, in urban history, and in the history of Armenians.

She is a member of the following editorial boards: Historický časopis (Bratislava, Slovakia); Századok; Urbs. Várostörténeti Évkönyv; Historical Studies on Central Europe (Budapest), Library of “Lehahayer” (Cracow), and Historia Urbana (Sibiu, Romania). She was member of several grants in Romania, Hungary, Germany and the Czech Republic, and principal investigator of “The Political Elite from Transylvania (1867-1918)”, Romanian National Council for Scientific Research (UEFSCDI, PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0040) (2011-2016), and of “Change and continuity: the public administration and the civil servants` corps from Transylvania before and after the First World War (1910-1925)”, Romanian National Council for Scientific Research (UEFSCDI, PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2016-0390) (2017-2020).

In this project, Judit Pál focuses on the social, political, and administrative transformation of the patron-client relations, patronage, and nepotism in Transylvania.

Email: [email protected]

Selected Publications:
András Vári, Judit Pál, Stefan Brakensiek: Herrschaft an der Gränze. Mikrogeschichte der Macht im östlichen Ungarn im 18. Jahrhundert. Köln – Weimar – Wien, Böhlau, 2014. (Adelswelten, 2.).

Der Preis der Freiheit. Die freie königliche Stadt Szatmátnémeti am Anfang des 18. Jahrhunderts. In: Stefan Brakensiek–Heide Wunder (Hrsg.): Ergebene Diener ihrer Herren? Herrschaftsvermittlung im alten Europa. Köln–Weimar–Wien, Böhlau, 2005. 123–143.

The Local Exercise of Power in Sătmar County at the Beginning of the 18th Century. Transylvanian Review, vol. XXI, Supplement no. 2. (2012) Institutional Structures and Elites in Sălaj Region and Transylvania in the 14^th–18^th Centuries. Ed. András W. Kovács. 237−251.

Electoral Corruption in Austro-Hungarian Transylvania at the Beginning of the Dualist Period (1867-1872). In: Frédéric Monier, Olivier Dard, Jens Ivo Engels (eds.): Patronage et corruption politiques dans l’Europe contemporaine. 2. Les coulisses du politique à l’époque contemporaine XIX^e-XX^e siècles. Paris, Armand Colin, 2014. 107−126.

Staatsbeamter oder Klient? Ein „Vermittler” aus Ostungarn zwischen verschiedenen sozialen Normen. In: Karl-Peter Krauss (Hg.): Normsetzung und Normverletzung. AlltäglicheLebenswelten im Königreich Ungarn vom 18. bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2014. 125−142. (Schriftenreihe des Instituts für Donauschwäbische Geschichte und Landeskunde, Bd. 19.)