Maria Bucur

• John W. Hill Chair of European History, Department of History
• Associate Professor, Department of History
• Director, Russian and East European Institute

Education

• Ph.D. at University of Illinois, 1996

Contact Information

Ballantine Hall, Rm. 719

(812) 855-1993

mypage.iu.edu/~mbucur/

Background

My research and teaching interests focus on European history in the modern period, especially social and cultural developments in Eastern Europe, with a special interest in Romania (geographically) and gender (thematically). I began my intellectual journey by investigating the ways in which cultural producers and social policy makers tried to engineer the future during the first half of the twentieth century. This led to the publication of my first book, Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania. Subsequently I moved on to examine how various local communities and official state institutions in Eastern Europe tried to engineer the past, by constructing representations of wartime violence through monuments and commemorative processes. This project has become a book manuscript I am currently writing, entitled The Violence of Memory and Memory of Violence on the Edge of Europe. In addition to these books, I've also published a number of essays on on eugenics, philanthropy, the cultural history of the Great War, commemorations of World War II, and gender and war. My teaching combines these specific research interests with broader pedagogical ones. I've taught courses on the idea of Europe, film and history, gender in Modern Europe, as well as communism in Europe. I am also the chair of the gender and sexuality field in the History department as well as editor of the Journal "Aspasia", an international yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European women's and gender history.

Selected Awards

• Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award (2006)
• Multidisciplinary Development Grant, Indiana University (2004)
• Indiana University Outstanding Junior Faculty Award (2002)
• National Endowment for the Humanities Research Grant (2001)
• Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Grant (1999)
• I.R.E.X. Resident Research Grant (1995)

Research Interests

• Gender
• Culture
• War and memory
• Eastern Europe

Courses Recently Taught

• The Idea of Europe (undergraduate)
• Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century (undergraduate/graduate)
• Nationalism in the Balkans, 1804-1920 (undergraduate/graduate)
• Women, Men, and Society in Modern Europe (undergraduate)
• Opposition, Survival, and Resistance in Communist Eastern Europe (undergraduate and graduate)
• Problems in East European Historiography: Graduate Colloquium
• Cultural History: Graduate Seminar
• Cultural History: Memory and Culture (graduate)
• Gender in Modern Europe

Publication Highlights

Books

Heroes and Victims. Remembering War in Twentieth Century Romania (Indiana University Press, 2009)

Making Europe. People, Politics and Culture, co-author with Frank Kidner, et al (Houghton Mifflin, 2007)

[Co-edited with Nancy M. Wingfield] Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania. Series in Russian and East European Studies. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. Translated into Romanian as as Eugenie si modernizare in Romania interbelictr. Raluca Popa. Iasi: Polirom, 2005.

[Co-edited with Mihaela Miroiu] Patriarhat si emancipare in istoria gindirii politice romanesti [Patriarchy and Emancipation in the History of Romanian Political Thought]. Iasi: Polirom, 2002.

[Co-edited with Nancy Wingfield]Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present. 1Central European Studies Series. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2001.

Articles

"An Archipelago of Stories: Gender History in Eastern Europe," part of the forum Revisiting Joan Scott's Gender as a Category of Analysis.  American Historical Review vol. 113 (December 2008): 1375-1389.