Ana Țăranu
PhD candidate, Department of Sociology
Ana Țăranu is a PhD candidate with the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick and the Department of Film and Media, Babeș-Bolyai University, in a joint programme funded by the EUTOPIA Alliance.
Her doctoral research approaches the cultural history of the contemporary far-right in Central Eastern Europe, with a focus on Romania.
She has previously published on Romanian intellectual history and literary culture. She is part of the editorial board of Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory.
Alex Cistelecan
Researcher at the Faculty of Theater and Film
Alex Cistelecan is researcher at the Faculty of Theater and Film, Babeș-Bolyai University and lecturer at George Emil Palade University of Medicine, Pharmacy, Science, and Technology of Targu Mures.
He has published De la stânga la stânga. Lecturi critice în câmpul progresist [From Left to Left: Critical Readings in the Progressive Camp], Tact, 2019; and edited Wronging Rights. Philosophical Challenges for Human Rights (Routledge, 2011, with Aakash Singh Rathore), Plante exotice. Teoria si practica marxistilor romani [Exotic Plants. The Theory and Practice of Romanian Marxists] (Tact, 2015, with Andrei State).
He has published articles in journals such as Historical Materialism, Telos, Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, Studies in East European Thought, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books.
Mihnea Bâlici
PhD candidate, Faculty of Letters’
Mihnea Bâlici is a PhD candidate within the Faculty of Letters’ Department of Romanian Literature and Literary Theory at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. He is currently working on a thesis about the literary representation of labour migration in the Romanian post-Communist novel.
His research interests are Marxism, world-systems analysis, ideological narratology, and the sociological reading of Romanian contemporary literature.
He is a research assistant within the international team of the research project “Philosophy in Late Socialism: Theoretical Practices in the Face of Polycrisis”, as well as in the project “A Global History of Romanian Comparatism: A Case Study in Inter-Imperial Comparative Literature”, both presently ongoing at Babeș-Bolyai University.
Martin Küpper
Research associate
Martin Küpper does his doctorate at the University of Kiel on scientific aesthetics in the GDR. He is currently a research associate at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj (Romania), where he is involved in an interdisciplinary project on philosophy in historical socialism.
He is the author of an introduction to materialism (PapyRossa, 2021) and numerous articles on the history of materialism, dialectics and philosophical Marxism. He is currently working on a biography of the philosopher, art theorist and politician Hans Heinz Holz.
Siyaves Azeri
Film conservationist, Media studies Researcher
Siyaves Azeri is an associate professor of philosophy at the Faculty of Theatre and Film, Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
Azeri is the primary investigator of the project “Philosophy in Late Socialist Europe: Theoretical Practices in the Face of Polycrisis” (F104/15.11.2022), which is funded by the European Resilience Fund.
He is also the Co-Editor in Chief of the journal Marxism & Sciences and an associate of the “Theses Twelve: Mardin Value-form Circle.”
Azeri writes on a large gamut of subjects in different international journals and books. His areas of interest include Marxian materialism, the critique of epistemology, the problem of consciousness, philosophical psychology, Kant’s transcendentalism and Hume’s empiricism.
Leyla Safta-Zecheria
Pedagogist and an anthropologist
Leyla Safta-Zecheria is a pedagogist and an anthropologist. She holds a PhD in Political Science/ Public Policy from Central European University Budapest and an MA in European Ethnology from Humboldt University Berlin.
She is a postdoctoral researcher with the project “Philosophy in Late Socialist Europe: Theoretical Practices in the Face of Polycrisis” at the Babeș-Bolyai University, a lecturer at the Educational Sciences Department, an affiliate of the University Clinic for Psychopedagogical Therapies and Counselling, West University of Timișoara and a research affiliate of the Inequalities and Democracy Workgroup at the Democracy Institute at Central European University Budapest/Vienna.
She has held research fellowships at the Institut fur die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM/Vienna), the New Europe College Bucharest, the Universidad Federal de Sao Carlos (Sao Paulo/ Brazil) and the University of Toronto.
In her current research, she uses qualitative, visual and participatory methods to understand the ways in which instances of social, economic and educational inequality are lived through and described by marginalized people, as well as how these instances come to be constructed socially, historically and epistemologically.
Liri CHAPELAN
Film conservationist, Media studies Researcher
Liri CHAPELAN is a film conservationist and a researcher in the field of media studies. Some of her areas of interest include “minor” film genres, such as useful or amateur cinema, the underrepresentation of animation in film studies and the efforts to preserve, restore and valorize cinematic heritage, especially in non-Western countries. She aims to explore these topics by fusing archival work, research, editing, teaching and curating.
Jan Mervart
Affiliated researcher at Babes-Bolyai University
Jan Mervart focuses on modern Czech and Slovak intellectual and cultural history. His latest book, written together with Jiří Růžička, is devoted to the intellectual history of Czechoslovak post-Stalinist Marxism (“Rehabilitate Marx!” The Czechoslovak party intelligentsia and thinking post-Stalinist modernity”, Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburg Press, forthcoming).
Together with Adam Hudek and Michal Kopeček he coedited Czechoslovakism (London: Routledge, 2021) and together with Joseph Grim Feinberg and Ivan Landa he coedited Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete (Leiden: Brill, 2021). Jan Mervart is the head of the Department for the Study of Modern Czech Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, and he is affiliated as a researcher at the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj.
Christian Ferencz-Flatz
philosopher and media scholar
Christian Ferencz-Flatz is a philosopher and media scholar, currently affiliated as a researcher at the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj. He teaches at the National University of Theatre and Film in Bucharest. His research concerns phenomenology, critical theory, the philosophy of history, film- and media philosophy.
He published numerous essays and research articles in philosophical and film scholarly journals and translated into Romanian key theoretical works by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer. Together with filmmaker Radu Jude, he co-authored the found footage film Eight Postcards from Utopia (2024). He is currently developing a research project devoted to post-socialist advertising.
With Alex Cistelecan, he co-edited the special issue of Studies in East European Though 2023: The Reception of Existentialist Philosophy in Eastern European Countries under Socialism. With Julian Hanich, he edited the journal issue Studia Phaenomenologica XVI: Film and Phenomenology (2016). His latest monographs include: Critical Theory and Phenomenology. Polemics, Appropriations, Perspectives (Springer, 2023) and Filmul ca situație socială / Film as a Social Situation (Tact, 2018).
Vlad Pojoga
Vice-Dean for Academic Affairs and Lecturer in World Literature and Narrative Theory, Faculty of Letters
Vlad POJOGA is Vice-Dean for Academic Affairs and Lecturer in World Literature and Narrative Theory at the Faculty of Letters and Arts at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania.
He wrote a PhD on interactive narratives and co-edited two volumes, “The Culture of Translation in Romania” and “Ruralism and Literature in Romania”, both published with Peter Lang.
He has translated extensively from English into Romanian, including Fredric Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” or Sianne Ngai’s “Our Aesthetic Categories.”
His research focuses mainly on the relationship between literature and the digital and the integration of Romanian literature into world literature. He is one of the editors of SCOPUS Q1 Transilvania, a highly rated Romanian literary studies journal.
Claudiu Turcuş
Dean for Faculty of Theatre and Film
Claudiu Turcuş is Associate Professor of Literary and Film studies at Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj and Dean of Theatre and Film School. He published widely on topics such as the cultural memory and the intellectual history of (post)socialism, or the ideology, and aesthetics of New Romanian Cinema.
His book, Norman Manea. Aesthetics as East Ethics (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 UP, 2019); and recently the volume Romanian Capitalism on Screen. Microhistories of Hope, Anxiety and Adaptation (Edinburgh UP, 2025).
Raluca Sas
Project Manager
Raluca Sas-Marinescu is specialized in Text Processing for Performances, Adaptation and Dramatization, Film Screenwriting, and Dramatic Writing, and she is a dramaturge. She obtained her PhD in Theatre from Babeș-Bolyai University with a thesis on contemporary techniques and methods of dramatic writing.
She researches in the field of Theatre and Performing Arts, her artistic practice focuses on constructing original texts based on collaborative practices. In parallel, she develops creative writing projects dedicated to adolescents and documents the dramaturgical practices of the last twenty years. In recent years, she has concentrated on documentary theatre and techniques for activating archives.
Her publications include: Dramaturg&dramaturgie: metode, tehnici și studii de caz (Bucharest: Eikon, 2017), “Only Lovers Left Alive” in the volume Ghid de supraviețuire pentru teatrologi (Bucharest: Eikon, 2014), “Dramaturg și dramaturgie în creația colectivă – definiții și exemple”, Symbolon, 2018, “Mozgó drámairodalom – a színházi szöveg állapota Romániában” in Szépirodalmi Figyelő, Budapest, 2019.
She has participated in the creation of numerous performances including: Occupy Yourself (2015) and Reactring Cernobîl (2016) Cluj Napoca, VaroteremProjekt, Promisiunea unei vieți frumoase (din cauza lui Cehov) (2013) and Vacuum (2014), Râmnicu Vâlcea, Anton Pann Theatre, Fontana di Trevi (2012) and Visul unei nopți de vară (2003) Satu Mare, North Theatre, Antemporal.G (2004), Baia Mare, Municipal Theatre.
Courses taught: Text Processing for Performances, Dramatization, Narrative Structures in Contemporary Theatre and Film, Creative Writing in Performing Arts, Collaborative Practices in Independent Theatre, Aesthetics of Documentary Theatre, Literary manegement and Artistic Counseling.
Claudia Beldean
Technical Project Manager
Gabriel Mocanu
Technician
Una Blagojevic
Adela Hîncu
Ştefan Baghiu
Ana Szel
Ion Copoeru
Costi Rogozanu
