During strategic meetings, TransCorr members discuss their conceptual and methodological approach, their empirical/archive-based research, and identify case-studies relevant to the project. These state-of-the-project gatherings ensure the coordination of workflow across the team as well as the organization of the publications and scientific events.
Author: TransCorr
International Conference June 2024
The New Europe College – Institute for Advanced Study in Bucharest hosts the first major international TransCorr event from the 17th to the 18th of June 2024. During the conference, Conceptualizing Corruption: The “Old Regime” and the New Order in East-Central-South Europe (1750s-1850s), participants present their works that employ a (de)constructivist and/or sematic approach to study ‘corruption’ and its relationship to the rise of modernity. Focusing on Central-South-East Europe from the 1750s to the 1850s, panelists situated changing notions of ‘corruption’ in a transnational context.
Andrei SORESCU
« Team
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)
Constanţa VINTILĂ
« Team
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.
Alex TIPEI
« Team
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.
Judit PÁL
« Team
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 14th–18th 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 XIXe-XXe 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.)
Mária PAKUCS
« Team
Mária PAKUCS is a senior researcher with the “N. Iorga” Institute of History (Bucharest), Romanian Academy. She received her PhD in 2004 from the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, and her habilitation in 2022 from the Romanian Academy. She was a New Europe College fellow in 2003-2004, a Fernand Braudel fellow at the MSH Paris (2004), and an Andrew W. Mellon fellow at the Herzog-August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel (2006). She was member of the LuxFass project, an ERC-CoG-2014 no. 646489 hosted by the NEC and coordinated by Constanța Vintilă, and now is principal investigator of the “Good governance (gute Policey) in the towns of Transylvania and Wallachia, 1500-1800”, project no. PN-III-P4-PCE-
2021-0376 financed by the Romanian National Council for Scientific Research (UEFISCDI).
The research interests of Mária Pakucs were mostly shaped by her extensive work in the archives of Sibiu (Romania): history of trade with the Ottoman Empire, merchant networks in South-eastern Europe, urban history, and the concept of “good governance” in the early modern period.
In the TransCorr, Mária Pakucs will investigate the changes of political vocabulary in the early modern polity of Transylvania, the political and administrative discourse on governance, and the idea of “corruption” and “abuse” at local levels. Moreover, she will trace the career and activity of a little-known governor of Transylvania, Ladislaus Bánffy in a micro-historical approach.
Email: [email protected]
Selected Publications:
“The idea of good marriage at the end of sixteenth century Transylvania. Mathias Raw vs. Catharina Birthalmer,” in Common Man, Society and Religionin the 16th Century/ Gemeiner Mann, Gesellschaft und Religion im 16. Jahrhundert. Piety, morality and discipline in the Carpathian Basin / Frommigkeit, Moral und Sozialdisziplinierung im Karpatenbogen, ed. Ulrich Wien, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021. p. 309-320.
Policy and Policey and Obrigkeit: The ideology of political power in sixteenth-century Sibiu (Hermannstadt), in Reform and Renewal in Medieval East and Central Europe: Politics, Law and Society, Minerva III. Acta Europaea, vol. 15, Studies in Russia and Eastern Europe, vol. 14, ed. by Suzana Miljan – Éva B. Halász – Alexandru Simon, Romanian Academy – Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts – School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, Cluj-Napoca – Zagreb – London, 2019, p. 643-663
“This is their profession:‟ Greek merchants in Transylvania and their commercial networks at the end of the 17th century, Cromohs- Cyber Review of Modern Historiography, vol. 21, 2017/2018, p. 36-54.
Lucien FRARY
« Team
Lucien FRARY (PhD, University of Minnesota, 2003) is a professor of history at Rider University, where he has been teaching since 2004. His scholarly work deals with Mediterranean, Slavic, and Eastern Orthodox history and culture, in particular Russia’s interest in the Near East, since around the time of the formation of the Ottoman emirate. He is the author of Russia and the Making of Greek Identity, 1821-1844 (Oxford, 2015), the editor of Thresholds into the Orthodox Commonwealth: Essays in Honor of Theofanis G. Stavrou (Slavica, 2017), and the co-editor of Russian-Ottoman Borderlands: The Eastern Question Reconsidered (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014). Recently, he edited 1821 – A New Dawn for Greece. Greek Struggle for Independence, a special issue of Online Military Studies 2 (2022), an open access journal published by De Gruyter.
He currently teaches a variety of courses on Russian history, ancient and modern Greece, the Balkans and the Ottoman empire, as well as surveys of the era of World War II, Nazi Germany and Hitler’s Europe, and the history of socialism. For the past few years, he has been working on a book about aristocratic culture and the making of imperial Russian foreign policy, based on the biography of Grigorii Aleksandrovich Stroganov (1770-1857). He has published about 100 book reviews, and numerous articles and book chapters.
For the TransCorr project, Prof. Frary is scouring the accounts of European and Russian travelers to the Ottoman Balkans. His goal is to feature a few of the key works that became fundamental to the conception of the region as backward and corrupt, and why these impressions emerged in the minds of foreigners, and how these accounts spread the news across the world. Based on this first project, he hopes to expand and discover new angles to create a clearer understanding of the region, and the topic of corruption. He also hopes to find interesting and sometimes amusing, sad, emotional, or even exciting stories about the Ottoman Balkans and corruption, that would be good to share with interested readers.
Email: [email protected]
Augusta DIMOU
« Team
Augusta DIMOU is Privatdozentin at the Institute of Cultural Studies, Chair of Comparative European History, University of Leipzig. She received her degrees from the Universities of Innsbruck (B.A., 1993), Florida (M.A., 1995), the European University Institute (Ph.D., 2003), and the University of Leipzig (Habil., 2022). She has been researcher and/or lecturer at the University of Ioannina (2005-2007), Institute of Slavic Studies of the University of Leipzig (2006-2009), Georg-Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research –
Braunschweig (2003-2006), IOS – Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies – Regensburg (2016-2017), Humboldt University
(2014-2025), and the Leibniz-Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) (2010-2012). She has held postdocs and/or scholarships at the German Historical Institute in Paris (2015, 2023), New Europe College (NEC, 2021-2022), Gerda Henkel Foundation (2015-2016), Freiburg Institute of Advanced Study (FRIAS, 2013), Center of Advanced Study – Sofia (CAS, 2009-2010), Institute for Human Sciences (IWM, 2002), Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (2005).
Augusta Dimou specializes in comparative and transnational history at the intersection between regional, European, and global processes with a focus on Southeastern and Eastern Europe. She has worked on modern state-, and nation-building, the history of political modernity and the diffusion of modern ideologies, the sociology of intellectuals and the history of social movements. In her most recent work, she has concentrated on the history of intellectual property, the history of media and the development of cultural professions.
Within TransCorr, Augusta Dimou will concentrate on (theoretical and practical) notions and processes of “transition.” Her project “empire after empire” will investigate the post-1878, post-Ottoman administrative set-up of the Habsburg empire in Bosnia and the perceptions of the successor empire on the ancien régime.
Email: [email protected]
Selected Publications:
Entangled Paths Towards Modernity. Contextualizing Socialism and Nationalism in the Balkans. Budapest/N.Y: CEU Press, 2009.
Re-Imaging the Balkans. How to Think and Teach a Region (with Theodora
Dragostinova and Veneta Ivanova), Festschrift in Honor of Professor Maria N.
Todorova, (Schriften zur Gegenwart und Geschichte Südosteuropas, vol. 168).
Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022.
Contesting Copyright. A History of Intellectual Property in East Central Europe and the Balkans (19th and 20th centuries). Budapest/N.Y: CEU Press, 2023.
Constantin ARDELEANU
« Team
Constantin ARDELEANU is Senior Researcher at the Institute for South-East European History and Long-Term Fellow at the New Europe College, Bucharest. Formerly, he was Professor of Modern History at the Department of History, Philosophy, and Sociology of “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi.
Ardeleanu is interested in the social and economic history of Danubian Europe and the Black Sea region since the eighteenth century. He has published extensively on various topics connected with the opening of the Black Sea to international trade and shipping and the market integration of South-Eastern European port cities. He has been a member of different national and European
research teams and is currently PI of a Romanian-funded research project (2022–2024) entitled “Entangled Histories of the Danubian Quarantine System (1774–1914)”.
In TransCorr, Ardeleanu will lead the second investigative direction, “Old practices, new interactions? Favouritism, interests, patronage,” a sub-group working on specific patron-client bonds within Central-South-East Europe. The sub-group’s members aim to craft a series of micro-historical case-studies that focus on four key areas, thus furnishing an empirical basis for the entire team’s synthetic analysis of the variety of forms of favouritism, patron-client ties, and informal associations that actors mobilized during the period: (a) vocabularies of patronage; b) construction and reproduction of networks; c) actors in their networks and d) actors’ agenda. Within this analytical framework, Ardeleanu will study how mercantile networks adapted to the
emergence of modern capitalism and the market integration in and beyond the region, and how the merchants’ interactions within the mercantile world and with public authorities reconfigured the political and economic landscape in South-East Europe’s imperial borderlands.
Email: [email protected]
Selected publications:
The European Commission of the Danube, 1856–1948: An Experiment in International Administration, Brill, 2020
Making Ukraine: Negotiating, Contesting, and Drawing the Borders in the Twentieth Century, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022 (co-editor, with Olena Palko)