Dana Mihailescu

Dana Mihailescu is Associate Professor of English/American Studies at the University of Bucharest. She earned her Ph.D. in Philology at the University of Bucharest in January 2010, with a dissertation entitled Ethical Dilemmas and Reconfigurations of Identity in Early Twentieth Century Eastern European Jewish American Narratives. She was a Fulbright Junior Visiting Researcher at Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, in 2008-2009, and the Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University in 2021-2022. 

On the one hand, she has examined how memory and the ethics of remembrance function for the immigrant generations of Eastern European Jews coming to the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, as reflected in narratives of authors born in the Pale of Settlement (e.g. Mary Antin, Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska) or Romania (Konrad Bercovici, M.E. Ravage, Maurice Samuel). On the other hand, she is interested in how memory works for Holocaust child survivors and for the 2nd and 3rd (plus) generations, and how its complex paths influence fiction writing and history making. Among her most recent projects are a published monograph, Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890-1930. Struggles for Recognition (Lexington Books/An Imprint of Rowman and Littlefield, 2018); an article on the early postwar representation of Jewish orphans returning from Transnistria to Romania at the end of World War II in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 36, no. 3, 2022; an encyclopedia entry on "Hate Crime" in Violence in American Society: An Encyclopedia of Trends, Problems, and Perspectives, edited by Chris Richardson (ABC-CLIO GREENWOOD, 2020) and a research grant, Transcultural Networks in Narratives about the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. She is currently writing a monograph about the fusgeyer movement.

You can also access my CV by clicking here: https://www.academia.edu/2197160/CV_dana_mihailescu

Latest joint project:

PCE grant 101/2021, “Familiar Perpetrators: On the Intimacy of Evil in Contemporary American Literature and Popular Culture,” director: Mihaela Precup, funded by UEFISCDI