Author: TransCorr

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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.)

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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.

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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]

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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 (19^th and 20^th centuries). Budapest/N.Y: CEU Press, 2023.

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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)

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Silvia MARTON is associate professor of political science at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest. She received her PhD in political science from the University of Bologna (2007) and University of Bucharest (2006). She was researcher, visiting professor, or guest lecturer at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) (2012, 2013), Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (Paris) (2009, 2010), University of Avignon (2015, 2016, 2018), University Paris-Sorbonne (LabEx EHNE) (2017), and Autonomous University of Barcelona (2019). She was a research fellow of the New Europe College – Institute for Advanced Studies, Bucharest (2003-04, 2020-21), and Andrew W. Mellon fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2005); postdoctoral fellow of Agence universitaire de la francophonie at Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris) (2007). Since 2009, she co-organizes (with Constanța Vintilă 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. She was member
of the CNRS-funded network “Politics and corruption: history and sociology” (GDRI CNRS 840) (2017- 2020), and principal investigator of “Colonial Anxieties, Corruption Scandals and Xenophobia in Nineteenth-Century Infrastructure Development in Romania”, Romanian National Council for Scientific Research (Uefiscdi, PN-III-P4-PCE-2021-0399) (2022-2024).

Silvia Marton began her career studying the relationship between modernization and state- and nation- building processes in nineteenth-century Romania and Eastern Europe. Her analyses focused on the place
of anti-Semitism and parliamentarism in these dynamics. Since then, her scholarship has also made contributions to the constructivist (comparative) history and sociology of political “corruption”.

In TransCorr, Silvia Marton focuses on the diachronic transformation and semantics of “corruption.” Via a series of transnational micro-historical case-studies, she examines the redefinition of “corruption,” how the Ottoman (and other imperial) past(s) was reframed, and how deviation and “corruption” were formalized and codified. She also studies specific patron-client bonds, vocabularies of patronage and favouritism, construction and reproduction of networks, and historical actors’ networks and agendas.

Email: [email protected]

Selected publications:
Moralité du pouvoir et corruption en France et en Roumanie, XVIIIe-XXe siècle, Presses universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne, 2017 (co-edited with Frédéric Monier and Olivier Dard)

“La ‘corrupción’ electoral en Rumania. Los comienzos titubeantes de la democracia”, Ayer. Revista de Historia Contemporánea, vol. 115, no. 3, 2019, p. 77-104

“Transparency” and “corruption” in Romanian electoral politics (1866–1914)”, in Jens Ivo Engels, Frédéric Monier (eds.), History of Transparency in Politics and Society, Goettingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht unipress, 2020, p. 35-51

„Política «oculta»: Publicidad, secretismo, transparencia e inteligibilidad en la Rumanía de finales del siglo xix” (with Andrei-Dan Sorescu), in Frédéric Monier, Lluís Ferran Toledano, Joan Pubill and Gemma Rubí (eds.), Las sombras de la transparencia. Secreto, corrupción y “Estado profundo” en la Europa
contemporánea, Granada, Comares, 2022, p. 21-43.