Information about the Authors
Abstract
Raluca-Isabel Bleier is a second-year Master’s student in Aesthetics at Université Paris 1 Panthéon — Sorbonne, specialising in Cultural Studies: Images, Spaces, and Media. Her research focuses on post-communist cultural practices, popular music, and the aesthetics of marginality in Eastern Europe. She is currently based in Helsinki, Finland, where she works as a political assistant at the Romanian Embassy, with professional experience in cultural and public diplomacy, including an internship at the Romanian Cultural Institute in Paris. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Political Humanities from Sciences Po Paris in 2024.
Carmen Dura is a Romanian language lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad (Republic of Serbia). She holds degrees in literature, theology, and music from Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași and the George Enescu University of Arts in Iași. Her doctoral dissertation, Pragmatics of Romanian Dramatic Discourse in the 20th Century, was defended in 2007 at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași under the supervision of Professor Constantin Frâncu. Her research interests include linguistics — particularly linguistic pragmatics — Romanian literature, with a focus on the works of Bartolomeu Valeriu Anania and Nicolae Steinhardt, as well as sacred music preserved in manuscript and early printed sources.
Brendan Humphreys is an Associate Professor of East European studies, based at Helsinki University's Aleksanteri Institute. He is a political historian and anthropologist, whose research interests include the Cold War, the Balkans, carceral studies, nationalism and exceptionalism, and the sociology of conflict. His works include Russian Modernization, a New Paradigm, (with Markku Kivinen, Routledge, 2021) and From Gulag to Euro Prisons, (with Judith Pallot, Palgrave, 2026).
Ioana Jieanu is a guest lecturer at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, where she teaches Romanian as a foreign language and coordinates teaching workshops based on games, translation, and theatre, within the framework of the Romanian Language Institute (Bucharest). She is also Lecturer in Contemporary Romanian Language in the Department of Philology, Faculty of Letters and Sciences, at the University of Ploiești (UPG). Her research focuses on language contact involving Romanian migrant communities in Europe, a topic developed in her PhD dissertation and postdoctoral research, as well as on the teaching of Romanian as a foreign language.
Rasmira Majetić-Ramić studied German and Spanish languages and literatures at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. She is currently completing a Master’s degree in Spanish Studies, with a thesis on the history, language, and literature of the Sephardim in Bosnia and Herzegovina, focusing on the linguistic features of Judeo-Spanish through contrastive analysis with contemporary Spanish. Her Master’s research in German linguistics addressed deontic modality in German, Spanish, and Slovenian legal texts, reflecting her interest in specialised and legal discourse. She began studying Romanian in 2020 and has since been actively involved in translation workshops, translating Romanian literary texts into Slovenian, and participating in projects that promote Romanian language, culture, and literature in Slovenia. She is currently employed at the Slovenian-German Chamber of Industry and Commerce, where she contributes to the development of bilateral cooperation between Slovenian and German institutions and companies.
Denisa Radu holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cultural Studies, with a focus on ritual sacrifice in folklore and fairy tales, and a Master’s degree from the West University of Timișoara (Romania), where her dissertation examined the social and psychological dimensions of Herta Müller’s novels. She is currently a PhD student, working on a doctoral thesis dedicated to minor fantasy and postmodern imaginaries in the works of Michael Ende and Răzvan Rădulescu. She is also a German teacher at middle-school level.
Florin Oprescu is a guest lecturer at the Institute for Romance Studies, University of Vienna, where he teaches Romanian Literature and Romanian Media Studies, within the framework of the Romanian Language Institute (Bucharest). He completed his BA, MA, and PhD at the West University of Timișoara (Romania). He has held research grants at the University of Paris IV (Sorbonne) and at the University of Vienna, and between 2010 and 2012 he carried out postdoctoral research on Literature and Canon. In 2017, he obtained the Habilitation at the Institute for Romance Studies, University of Vienna, in the field of Romance Literary Studies, with a thesis on Literature and Power. His research interests include canon formation, power relations in literature, and modern Romanian literary discourse. His publications include the co-edited volume The Culture of (Im)Pudicity (2018, with Lindenbauer and Metzeltin) and the monographs Model şi cataliză în lirica românească modernă (2007), (In)actualitatea lui Eminescu (2010), Romanul românesc și morfologia puterii (2018), and Power and Literature: Strategies of Subversiveness in the Romanian Novel (2018).
Oana Topală is a teacher affiliated with the Romanian Language Institute (Bucharest, Romania) and with the Ministry of the Wallonia–Brussels Federation (General Administration of Education). She teaches Romanian language and culture in schools belonging to the French-speaking Community of Belgium. Her professional and research interests focus on intercultural and multilingual pedagogy, and she has coordinated numerous multilingual, multicultural, and interdisciplinary projects. Her areas of interest include intercomprehension, multilingualism, linguistic proximity, and sociolinguistics. Her publications include French–Romanian Linguistic Interferences in Children Attending Romanian Language, Culture and Civilisation Courses in Belgium (Brussels, 2021) and Pluri-, Inter-, and Transdisciplinarity: An Example of a Multidisciplinary Project with an Intercultural Aim (La Pensée et les Hommes, Brussels, 2024). Since 2024, she has been an editor at HEROS Journal.
Ioana Raluca Zaharia holds a PhD in Performing Arts and has an academic background in dramatic arts, puppetry, cultural management, and philosophy, acquired at the National University of Arts “George Enescu” (Romania), the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium), and the Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium). Since 2021, she has been a researcher at the Multidisciplinary Research Institute in Arts of the National University of Arts “George Enescu” in Iași. Her research interests include theatre and literature, interculturality, cultural patronage, Romanian and European dramaturgy, poetry, and Romanian artistic production in the diaspora. Committed to promoting Romanian theatre abroad, she published in 2024 the volume Avec ou sans masque. Le personnage féminin dans les comédies de Ion Luca Caragiale (EME Éditions, collection Divin et Sacré).
