Constantin Parvulescu (team leader) is associate professor of film and media studies and director of the Janovics Center for Screen and Performing Arts Studies at Babeș-Bolyai University. He has written several articles on the political cinema of Europe, film and economic history, and Eastern European film cultures. He is the author of Orphans of the East: Postwar Eastern European Cinema and the Revolutionary Subject (Indiana University Press, 2015) and the editor Global Finance on Screen: From Wall Street to Side Street (Routledge, 2017). With Robert Rosenstone he co-edited A Companion to the Historical Film (Blackwell-Wiley, 2013) and with Claudiu Turcus Europeanization in East-Central European Fiction Film (1980-2000) a special issue of Studies in Eastern European Cinema (2018).
Ana Grgić is an associate professor and researcher in film studies, and a film industry practitioner. In 2016, she received her PhD in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland (UK)with a thesis on visual culture, cultural memory and early cinema in the Balkans. Her research is focused on East European and Balkan cinemas, film history, visual culture and film archives. She acted as Co-Chair of the SCMS (Society for Cinema and Media Studies) Central/East/South European Scholarly Interest Group between 2016-2019. She is currently an Associate Editor of Studies in World Cinema: A Critical Journal (BRILL). Her selected publications include: Monograph, The Imaginary of the Balkans: Visual Culture, Modernity and Early Cinema, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press; Edited collection with Lydia Papadimitriou, Contemporary Balkan Cinema: Transnational Exchanges and Global Circuits, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, Nov 2020. Her current research projects include: “Globalising Malaysia: Trans-Asia Traffics in the 21st Century” with A/Prof Emma Baulch, A/Prof Andrew Ng, and Dr Ting Fai Yu, and “Food, representation and migration” with Prof Johan Höglund and Dr Vanessa Lee.
Daniel Iftene is lecturer of film and media studies at Babeș-Bolyai University. His research is focused on film history and theory, narrative structures and creative writing for audiovisual productions. In the past years, his film reviews and essays appeared in well-known Romanian cultural periodicals. His projects include film literacy workshops organized for various film festivals and cultural organizations, targeting the young audience. His publications include: “Sexual monstrosity in contemporary cult TV series: the case of the American Horror Story”, Ekphrasis. Images, Cinema, Theory, Media, 2016; “Imposing Audience Dictatorship on Romanian Filmmakers in the pre-Ceausescu Era”, Cluj-Napoca: Eikon, 2014; “Theatrical Influences in the Early Romanian Narrative Cinema”, Cluj-Napoca: Eikon, 2012; “Portraits of the Young in the New Romanian Cinema (2000-2011)”, Proceedings of The Digital Generation: Self-Representation, Urban Mythology and Cultural Practices, Cluj-Napoca: Eikon, 2011.
Alexandru Matei teaches French modern/contemporary culture and literature at the Faculty of Letters, University “Transylvania”, Brasov. He published a dozen of papers on the history of Romanian Socialist Television, in French, English and Romanian and a book, A Captivating Tribune. Television, Ideology, Society in Socialist Romania (Bucharest, 2013). His research interests are: Roland Barthes, French contemporary literature, socialist and post-socialist media culture, ecological thought, ecology and aesthetics. He has a PhD in French contemporary literature at Ecole des Hautes Etudes Supérieures, Paris – University of Bucharest (on Jean Echenoz’ novels), 2007. He translates from French into Romanian (Jean Baudrillard, Bruno Latour, Roland Barthes, Michel Serres). Books published : Theory in the “Post” Era. A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons, London, Bloomsbury, 2021 (co-authored); Roland Barthes, Romanian Mythologies (Bucharest, 2017); Jean Echenoz et la distance intérieure (Paris, 2013). The Last Days of Literature. Small and Huge in French Contemporary Literature (Bucharest, 2008).
Mădălina Pojoga is a PhD candidate in Film and Media Studies at Babeș-Bolyai University. She has a BA in Film Studies and an MA in Film and Performance Art at the Faculty of Theater and Film. She currently researches the representation of masculinity in the Romanian cinema during the communism. Her published work includes the following studies: „Socialist Feminism in the communist drama: ideology, aesthetics, and critical discourse”, „Chewing-gum for the eye: critical discourse of the Romanian popular film at the beginning of the 1990s” (Revista Transilvania), „Monalisas Without a Smile: Female Characters in Romanian Cinema between the ‘false feminism’ of the socialist era and the ‘antifeminism’ of the 1990s” in Studies in World Cinema and ”Misfists and Troubled Men. Masculinity and Violence in Romanian Socialist Cinema” in Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory.
Bogdan Popa is a theorist and researcher. His work explores the intersection between film studies and political theory, queer theory, and histories of Marxism in Eastern Europe. Bogdan’s recent book, „De-centering Queer Theory: Communist sexuality in the flow during and after the Cold War” (Manchester University Press, 2021) analyses competitive models of Cold War sexuality and inserts a Marxist epistemology in queer theory. He published „Shame: A Genealogy of Queer Practices in the Nineteenth Century” (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and „Sexul și Capitalul: O teorie a filmului românesc” (Tracus Arte, 2017). His articles on cinema investigate topics from early Romanian film directors to debates in New Romanian Cinema („The artist as realist: Jean Mihail and the de-alienating effects of socialist film”, Revista Transilvania, 10: 78-89; „What’s Wrong with the Romanian New Wave? Auteur Cinema, the Communist, and the Production of the Violent Working Class”, Studies in Eastern
European Cinema, Vol. 9, Issue 1, 89-102).
Armando Rotondi is an academic, journalist, and writer from Italy. He is Full Professor in Performance Theory and Storytelling, and Leader of the MA Creative Performance Practice at the IAB – Institute of the Arts Barcelona (validated by Liverpool John Moores University). He achieved his PhD at the University of Strathclyde in 2012, and he also gained 3 University professorship habilitations in Italy. Additionally, Armando worked as a Lecturer. Researcher and academic at institutes and universities in UK (Strathclyde), Italy (“Federico II,” and “L’Orientale” both in Naples, and Verona), Poland (Nicolaus Copernicus in Torun), Romania (ICR and Bucharest), Slovakia (Comenius University in Bratislava).
He is the author of several academic publications including: 11 authored and edited books; more than 50 book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals; more than 50 papers at international conferences (UK, USA, Italy, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Turkey, Romania, India, Czech Republic, Portugal, France), including 4 papers as keynote speakers and many chairs at focused panels. He is also active in the field of European and international research projects, such as one of the Project Managers of the Creative Europe “Make a Move”. Among his publication dedicated to Romanian history, culture and performing arts, the authored books: La Romania di Ceaușescu tra farsa e tragedia. Il sentimento tragico della storia, Sesto San Giovanni (MI): Mimesis, 2020; L’accusa. Processo e morte dei coniugi Ceaușescu, Rome: Progetto Cultura, 2020; “Il nome della rosa” a teatro: Aspetti scenico-letterari di “Numele trandafirului” da Umberto Eco a Grigore Gonţa, Rome: Edizioni Nuova Cultura, 2015. Among his contributions as articles and book chapters, a first detailed study in Italian on the acting tradition and methodology in Romania, theorizing the possibility of a Romanian “Grande attore” (as the Italian one) and a recent study on the relationships between theatrical “dramAcum” and “New Romanian wave”, focusing the case studies of Gianina Cărbunariu and Radu Jude.
Claudiu Turcuș is associate Professor of Literary and Film studies and Vice-Dean of Research and Academic Infrastructure at Faculty of Theatre and Film. He obtained his PhD in Humanities (2011) at Babeș-Bolyai University after fellowship research at Bard College, New York. His research interests are focused on East-Central European Literature, Cinema and Criticism. He published widely on topics such as the cultural memory of Socialism, the representation of post-communist transition, intellectual history, or the ideology of New Romanian Cinema. His book, Norman Manea. Aesthetics as East Ethics (Frankfurt-New York: Peter Lang, 2016) is the very first monograph about life and oeuvre of this important Romanian American writer, proposed twice for Nobel Prize. He co-authored (with Constantin Parvulescu) the chapter “Specters of Europe and Anti-communist Visual Rhetoric in the Romanian Film of the Early 1990s”, in Aga Skrodzka, Xiaoning Lu, and Katarzyna Marciniak, The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Lucian Țion is an assistant professor and researcher with experience in audio-visual media production, film and performing arts studies. His education combines a BA in video production from Middlebury College, U.S., an MA in film studies from the University of Amsterdam, and a PhD in theatre and film studies from the University of Singapore. His research areas are East European and Chinese cinemas, and socialism/post socialism studies. His publications include articles in Comparative Literature Studies, published by Penn State University Press, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Senses of Cinema, and Apparatus: Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe. His book contributions include chapters in Bloomsbury’s 2020 co-edited volume Third Cinema, World Cinema and Marxism; Cold War II: Hollywood’s Renewed Obsession with Russia, published in 2020 by the University Press of Mississippi; and Orientalism and Reverse Orientalism in Literature and Film: Beyond East and West published by Routledge in 2021. His book, Romanian and Chinese Cinemas will soon be published with Edinburgh University Press.
Camil Ungureanu is Associate Professor of Political Philosophy and Coordinator of the MA in Political Philosophy (http://www.upf.edu/filosofiapolitica/en/ ) at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). He has published on contemporary political theory as well as on art and politics in quarterlies such as the Journal of Political Philosophy, European Journal of Political Theory, Human Studies, Angelaki. Journal for Theoretical Humanities, The European Legacy, Antipode, and Political Geography. He has collaborated and published with Cambridge University Press, Routledge, and Ashgate. His interests are contemporary political philosophy; Critical Theory; art and philosophy (with a focus on contemporary cinema and literature).