Academic title: Professor

CV | Cristina PETRESCU is Professor of European History, Politics and Society at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest. She participated in several international research projects, including the Horizon 2020 project COURAGE – Cultural Opposition, 2016-2019. She authored From Robin Hood to Don Quixote: Resistance and Dissent in Communist Romania (Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedică, 2013), and co-edited Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian and Hungarian Case Studies (Budapest: Regio Books, 2001). She published in international volumes and peer-reviewed journals in the United States, Great Britain, Spain, Germany, Poland and Hungary over 30 studies.

Research interests: democratic transitions and authoritarian backsliding, identity politics and populism, memory studies

Courses: MCP, SPE, RISE, SPR, SSL

Selected recent publications:

• “Exit, Voice, Duplicity: Human Rights in Romanian Understanding, 1975-1989,” in Jakub Tyszkiewicz, ed., Human Rights and Political Dissent in Central Europe: Between the Helsinki Accords and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (London: Routledge, 2021), 80-96
• “Mapping the Cultural Heritage of Dissent: New Sources, New Knowledge and New Narrative(s) on European Identity,” Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea, Vol. 42 (2020), Special Issue New Perspectives on Contemporary Romania: From Dictatorial Pasts to a European Future, edited by Dragoș Petrescu, 79-86
• “Romania,” in Balázs Apor, Péter Apor & Sándor Horváth, eds., The Handbook of COURAGE: Cultural Opposition and Its Heritage in Eastern Europe (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2018), 151-170
• “Nostalgia, Identity and Self-Irony in Remembering Communism,” in Lavinia Stan & Lucian Turcescu, eds., Justice, Memory and Redress in Romania: New Insights (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2017), 192-213
• “Dissidenten im Kommunistischen Rumänien: Kritik, Handlungsstrategien und Selbsgestellte Aufgaben, 1977-1989,” (with Dragoș Petrescu), in Wolfgand Eichwede & Jan Pauer, eds., Ringen um Autonomie: Dissidentendiskurse in Mittel- und Osteuropa (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2017), 309-356.

Topics for BA/MA coordination:  (1) Democratic transitions and authoritarian shifts, (2) Climate change and climate action, (3) Political violence and terrorism, (4) Ethnic and religious conflicts

Office hours: 

E-mail: cristina.petrescu@fspub.unibuc.ro