Ioana Macrea-Toma

I joined the Archives in 2012. I am interested in the study of knowledge formation through the perspective of archival and media theories, the history of science, philosophy of history, and history of intellectuals. To date, I have been teaching courses and seminars on theoretical and methodological issues related to historiography both generally and also applied to the history of the Cold War. I also curated an exhibition about academic libraries (Bibliotheca: the Future of the Library), organized archival seminars and movie screenings.

I am an interdisciplinary scholar trained in philology, comparative literature, and history. My scholarly trajectory is perhaps typical of a literary historian in search of interpretive paradigms beyond the formal and context-free approaches within regional literary studies. In my dissertation about the literary field in Romania under Communism, I made a case for understanding political and literary choices as a matter of professional ethos, transnational interactions, and position-taking within a set of possible discursive frames. Currently, I am broadening these insights in order to write a book on the interplay of perceptions about the Other through the perspective of mutually observing cognitive systems during the Cold War (Radio Free Europe, secret police, intellectuals within the literary field, and listeners to the radio).

At the Archivum, I aim to embed my research interests in the Cold War and knowledge systems within the Archives’s ongoing archival activities, and to participate in the development of an Archival Laboratory. I see research, curatorial activity, and teaching as complementary parts within an ongoing project (both personal and institutional) of mapping history through the cognitive lenses of the archives. I am actively involved in archival projects while reflecting on their very epistemic assumptions. I do research and teach about genealogies of information-gathering practices from the early 1950s up to the current digital age. My interest in the relationship between forms, methods and content of knowledge make me also draw on perspectives from artistic research and art history. I integrate film screenings and exhibitions with the design of seminars as both objects of cultural history and heuristic tools in thinking about methodologies and various historical perspectives. In doing so, my research on cultural fields and my current focus on knowledge theories come together once again.

Since 2020, I am the academic coordinator of the Visegrad fellowship program.

I designed and directed the CEU Summer University Program Confronting the Crisis of Expertise. Historical Roots and Current Challenges (2021), and the summer school Cybernetic Models in Economy – an Eastern European Perspective (2019, with Tincuta Heinzel). I also designed the Archivum's research program Methodologies of Working in Cold War Archives and designed and co-directed with Istvan Rev the Archivum's archival internship for the History in the Public Sphere MA (2022, 2023 editions).   

Fellowships and Awards:

• 2011–2012 EURIAS Fellowship, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin
• 2011 Center for Advanced Studies Fellowship, Sofia, Bulgaria
• 2010 Fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C.
• 2009–2010 New Europe College Fellowship, Bucharest
• 2008–2009 Central European University Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship

Qualifications:

• PhD in Comparative Literature Department, Université d’Artois (France),
• Babeş-Bolyai University (Cluj-Napoca)
• MA in History, Central European University, Budapest
• MA in Comparative Literature, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca